This study explores the potential for South Africa to become an engine for intra- regional trade and industrial development by linking other Southern African countries to its global value chains and, in the process, improving its global trade competitiveness. The study identifies 'lead products'...

Economic integration, encompassing the removal or reduction of trade barriers and the coordination of monetary and fiscal policies, plays a pivotal role in promoting cooperation among nations. This systematic literature review examines the role of global value chains (GVCs) in promoting economic...

African countries are negotiating the African Continental Free Trade Area with the aim to spearhead global value chain (GVC) trade among African countries as a driver for robust economic growth. This paper evaluates the participation of Sub-Saharan African Regional Economic Communities (RECs) in...

The consensus back in 2008 – ten years after the introduction of the euro – was that the adoption of a common currency had made a limited impact of around 2% in total on the trade flows of the first wave of euro area countries (Baldwin et al., 2008). Since then, six more countries have...

We use the World Input-Output Database and build on Wang et al. (2013) gross exports decomposition to analyze the bilateral trade relation between Mexico and the United States from a value added perspective. Once we take into account that gross commercial flows are clouded by failing to account...

This paper summarises the economic analyses of the potential impact of Brexit on the United Kingdom, European Union (EU) and euro area performed by members of and contributors to the Brexit Task Force, a group reporting to the International Relations Committee of the European System of Central...

We show that traditional gravity variables play a significant role in explaining trade flows related to global value chain participation. We find evidence that cooperation costs - measured by linguistic and geographical proximity - are more relevant for trade that reflects cross-border...

This paper studies the role of reduced barriers to international trade from two dimensions: (i) the implementation of Free Trade Agreements and (ii) declining "border effects". Our empirical estimates suggest that diminished border effects accounts for the bulk of the increase in international...

In this paper, I estimate the impact of heterogeneity in non-tariff-measures (NTMs) policies on countries' global value chains (GVCs)-related trade and its backward and forward components. I firstly build a regulatory distance (RD) index, which measures the degree of dissimilarity in NTMs...

Gravity equations have been used for more than 50 years to estimate ex post the partial effects of trade costs on international trade flows, and the well-known - and traditionally presumed exogenous - "trade-cost elasticity" plays a central role in computing general equilibrium trade-flow and...