This report discusses the effect of global integration through trade and investment liberalization on small economies. Findings included the idea that small states are more vulnerable and experience greater income volatility than larger states, and that the sources of this vulnerability are...

What are the empirical effects of trade liberalization? This question is debated nowadays, in both an international and a regional scope. This work analyzes the economic inequality among Mexican states by means of a convergence methodology and spatial econometrics techniques. Results indicate a...

After twenty years of trade liberalization in Mexico, the relationship between gender wage inequality and trade remains insufficiently studied, in spite of evidence of increasing numbers of women in industrial employment. This study aims to analyze the effects of export orientation and other...

Trade and investment in services is inhibited by a range of policy restrictions, but the best offers so far in the Doha negotiations are on average twice as restrictive as actual policy. They will generate no additional market opening. Regulatory concerns help explain the limited progress. We...

Empirical evidence on the relationship between democracy and economic reforms is limited to few reforms, countries, and years. This paper studies the impact of democracy on the adoption of economic reforms using a new dataset on reforms in the financial, capital and banking sectors, product...

When the world economy was recently hit by a severe recession, governments all over the world reacted by initiating stimulus packages. Some countries (among them, most notably, China and the US) tried to put special emphasis on their home industries by including “Buy local” clauses into the...

The effects of the reduction of international trading costs on the internal economic geography of each country have been very scarcely studied in empirical terms. With data for Portugal since its adhesion to the European Union, we analyze the hypotheses put forward by the new economic geography...

We use a single-country multi-regional computable general equilibrium model to evaluate regional short-run impacts of reduction in import tariffs resulting from recent free trade area agreements, on poverty and distribution of income in Brazil. Results show that trade can reduce inter-regional...