While to an economist, business person or policy maker, movement of goods, services and foreign direct investment should logically be covered in the same agreement, history has not allowed this to happen. International legal regimes are spinning into greater fragmentation as the number of...

There is not one, perfect model for institutional regulatory cooperation, nor is there a single model for eliminating technical barriers to trade or discriminatory sanitary and phytosanitary measures in a preferential trade agreement (PTA). However, recent experience with PTAs has shown that it...

This paper investigates the feasibility of creating a common-currency union consisting of 16 countries in Southern Africa. We estimate an augmented-gravity model that includes public deficit, public debt, public expenditure, inflation, and the foreign reserves position. We also integrate...

The real effective exchange rate (REER) is one of the most cited statistical constructs in open-economy macroeconomics. We show that the models used to compute these numbers are not rich enough to allow for the rising importance of global value chains. Moreover, because different sectors within...

This paper documents the impact of the U.S-China trade war on firms worldwide and disentangles the transmission channels involved. Based on a quarterly and up-to-date panel of thousands of listed firms in 40 countries, I establish that firms with export exposure to China have had a decline in...

The Trans-Pacific Partnership and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership will impact on substantive market regulations in a wide a range of areas bearing on market access, both by establishing substantive new horizontal and sectoral standards and by establishing requirements regarding...

While China seeks to shift from exports to consumption-oriented economy and increase the self-sufficiency rate of exports, this study uses time-varying parameter vector autoregression (TVP-VAR) to examine the impact of economic structural changes in China on Korea's exports to China over time....

North-South competition in quality: Analyzing a new database that makes it possible to disaggregate trade flows across many countries according to unit values, we show that international specialization in terms of quality within industries and product categories plays an important role in the...

This paper describes the United States recently enacted Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) and assesses its quantitative impact on African exports. The AGOA expands the scope of preferential access of Africa`s exports to the United States in key areas such as clothing. However, its...

Over the last decade, the economic linkages between Switzerland and the rest of the world have been transformed. First, merchanting and the chemical industry account for an increasing share of international trade, with chemicals exports expanding robustly in recent years despite the European...