Deeper regional integration can be beneficial especially for regions along international borders. It can open up new markets on opposite sides of borders and give consumers wider access to cheaper goods. This paper uses data from five contiguous districts of India, Nepal, and Bangladesh in the...

Although a high rate of urbanization and a high incidence of rural poverty are two distinct features of many developing countries, there is little knowledge of the effects of the former on the latter. Using a large sample of Indian districts from the 1983-1999 period, the authors find that...

Using data on Israeli closures inside the West Bank, this paper provides new evidence on the labor market effects of conflict-induced restrictions to mobility. To identify the effects, the analysis exploits the fact that the placement of physical barriers by Israel was exogenous to local labor...

This paper revisits and expands the evidence on the impact of trade shocks on intra-state conflict with a large sample of developing countries in the 1960-2010 period. The results suggest that increases in the prices of a country's exported commodities raise the country's risk of civil conflict...

Trade has proven to be a powerful engine of growth worldwide. But not all countries have benefited equally. Despite much effort to use trade policy to catalyze exports, many developing countries have failed to achieve successful, sustainable exportand economic growth. Even with the benefit of...

Millennium Development Goal number 8 (MDG8) concerns those external flows (Official Development Assistance, trade and debt relief) that ought to help developing countries achieve the MDGs by 2015. This paper reviews the role of these MDG8-related external flows in the case of Bolivia. Riding on...

Recent evidence suggests that automation technologies entail a trade-off between produc- tivity gains and employment losses for the economies that adopt them. This paper casts doubts on such trade-off in the context of a developing country. It shows significant productivity and employment gains...

The outstanding export performance of South Asian countries (India in particular) over the 1990s has prompted some observers to see in it the roots of an export-led growth similar to that of its Southeast Asian neighbors. We employ export unit values (UVs) cum real competitiveness analysis to...