Discrepancies in bilateral trade statistics for forest products have recently attracted attention as potential indicators of illegal trade practices. For example, if exporters understate quantities to evade export taxes or quotas, then one might expect reported exports to be less than reported...

The authors explore the argument that trade between the Mercosur countries should be stimulated by preferential policies because of their geographic proximity. That is, that the Mercosur countries are candidates for natural integration. They find that, on average, transportation margins on trade...

The purpose of this paper is to review the major findings of existing studies on the Multifibre Arrangement's (MFA) effect, with emphasis on the effects to LDCs, and to suggest the directions for further studies that are needed for a better understanding of the MFA. The paper is composed of six...

Because many developing countries fail to report trade statistics to the United Nations, there has been an interest in using partner-country data to fill these information gaps. The author used partner-country statistics for 30 developing countries to"estimate"actual (concealed) trade data and...

The authors have prepared this paper as a companion to the Trade and Production database, which contains trade, production, and tariff data for 67 industrial and developing countries at the industry level for 1976-99. The sector disaggregation in the database follows the International Standard...

Regional agreements on standards have been largely ignored by economists and unconditionally blessed by multilateral trade rules. The authors find, theoretically and empirically, that such agreements increase trade between participating countries but not necessarily with the rest of the world....

Much attention has focused on the impact of the current crisis on goods trade; hardly any on its impact on services trade. Using new trade data from the United States, and more aggregate data from other OECD countries, the authors show that services trade is weathering the current crisis much...

Indian gross domestic product per capita increased rapidly between 2001 and 2006 in a climate of increasing services trade, with the export-oriented services sector responsible for rising shares of growth in gross domestic product. Due to its contribution to aggregate economic growth, there is a...

At the Davos forum of January 2014, a group of 14 countries pledged to launch negotiations on liberalizing trade in"green goods"(also known as"environmental"goods), focusing on the elimination of tariffs for an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation list of 54 products. The paper shows that the Davos...

Fernandes explores Colombian trade policy from 1977-91, a period of substantial variation in protection across industries, to examine whether increased exposure to foreign competition generates plant-level productivity gains. Using a large panel of manufacturing plants, she finds a strong...