In the last decade Morocco undertook substantial, if gradual, trade liberalization by reducing tariffs, reforming trade regulations and signing free and preferential trade agreements with several regions and countries, including the United States, Turkey, the European Union and Arab countries....

This paper analyzes previously unreleased firm-level customs transaction data from the Lao PDR in order to assess the determinants of cohort survival among exporters. The authors find that export flows in value terms are dominated by the intensive margin, with large firms continuing to supply...

This paper presents evidence of the importance of electronics global value chains (GVCs) in the global economy, and discusses the effects of the recent economic crisis on the industry. The analysis focuses on how information is exchanged and introduces the concept of"value chain modularity."The...

This paper examines the evolving, cross-country use of antidumping, safeguard, and countervailing duty policies -- temporary trade barriers (TTBs) -- over the period 1990-2009. The author constructs two new measures of imported products subject to the combined use of these TTBs before applying...

This paper offers a new economic explanation for the observed inter-industry differences in the size distribution of firms. The empirical estimates--based on three temporal (1982, 1987, and 1992) cross-sections of the four-digit United States manufacturing industries--indicate that increased...

Use of temporary trade barriers has proliferated across countries, industries, and even policy instruments. This paper constructs a panel of bilateral, product-level United States steel imports that are matched to a unique data set on trade policy exclusions that are associated with the 2002...

Trade liberalizations have been shown to improve domestic firms'performance through the new varieties of imported intermediate inputs. This paper uses a unique, representative sample of Bangladeshi garment firms to highlight that local intermediate inputs may also enhance domestic...

The paper develops a simple model to demonstrate that, paradoxically, greater competition may exacerbate the problem of corruption. Market participants engaging in corrupt practices enjoy lower production costs -- maybe because they pay a bribe to avoid installing the environmental safeguards...

Under neoclassical assumptions, and the usual ceteris paribus stipulations, a profit maximizing firm is expected to increase production in response to rising prices. These situations normally produce the rather well-known upward sloping supply curve for the firm which can usually be generalized...

This paper examines export diversification along the product and market dimensions for selected countries in the Europe and Central Asia region and, more generally, export performance. While the latter is extraordinary, with average export growth rates above 10 percent, the evidence on...