The increase in investment abroad during the past two decades may help explain the simultaneous worldwide rush toward free trade. The entry of foreign capital may change the political game, increasing openness to international trade no matter what form the foreign capital takes (whether entering...

Evidence from Mercosur suggests that eliminating duty drawbacks for intra-regional exports would lead to increased counterlobbying against protection of intermediate products. Without the duty drawback, the common external tariff would have been an estimated 3.5 percentage points (25 percent)...

The objective of this paper is to estimate the potential pro-poor bias in the existing structure of protection in six Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries (i.e., whether it redistributes income from rich to poor households). We also explore the extent to which the barriers faced by SSA exporters...

The database described in this article provides researchers with a broad set of data on trade, production, and protection for 28 manufacturing sectors at the three-digit level of the International Standard Industrial Classification, Revision 2. The database covers up to 100 developing and...

To understand the role of trade policies in the crisis of 2008, this paper constructs the overall trade restrictiveness indices for a wide range of countries using their tariff schedules in 2008 and 2009. The index summarizes the trade policy stance of a country, taking into account the share of...

Lessons from world experience about the consequences of exchange rate overvaluation (the frequent cause of trade crises), the consequences of trying to defend an overvalued exchange rate, and the most appropriate policies for resolving an overvaluation