This paper provides a historical look at how the multilateral trading system has coped with the challenge of shocks and shifts. By shocks we mean sudden jolts to the world economy in the form of financial crises and deep recessions, or wars and political conflicts. By shifts we mean slow-moving,...

The global Aid for Trade/AfT Initiative was inspired by the Doha Round of WTO negotiations. It involved specific aid commitments as well as a broad agreement on categories of AfT, and principles of delivery (outlined by a WTO Task Force in 2006). The WTO and the OECD were tasked with monitoring...

Recent research has sought to explore whether exporting enterprises have superior performance characteristics relative to non-exporters, and whether such superiority is associated with performance pre- and/or post- exporting. This paper extends existing research to take account of enterprise...

Technological change was unskilled-labor-biased during the early Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but is skill-biased today. This fact is not embedded in extant unified growth models. We develop a model of the transition to sustained economic growth...