This paper assesses the impact of the rise of China on the trade of Latin American and Caribbean economies. The study proposes an index to measure the impact on trade, which suggests sizable effects, especially in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Honduras, Mexico, and Paraguay. The paper uses the index...

Entrepreneurship is a fundamental driver of growth, development, and job creation. While Latin America and the Caribbean has a wealth of entrepreneurs, firms in the region, compared to those in other regions, are small in size and less likely to grow or innovate. Productivity growth has remained...

The data used in this study provides individual-level information about the population’s participation in social organizations and its willingness to trust members of their community. Argentina’s participation rate is close to 20%. The country’s trust rat

The United States imports around 25% of its merchandise under some form of preferential trade regime. This paper examines both the origins and the consequences of U.S. trade preferences in the context of the gravity model of international trade. The main contributions of the paper are threefold....

A model of firm innovation illustrates the effects of the threat of imitation and product varieties on a representative firm ' s decision to invest in research and development to produce new product varieties. The model motivates two empirical questions: (1) Is research and developm ent...

This paper studies the relationship between the growth of China and India in world merchandise trade and Latin American and Caribbean commercial flows from two perspectives. First, the authors focus on the opportunity that China and India's markets have offered Latin American and Caribbean...

The North American Free Trade Agreement (<EM t="s">nafta</EM>) is arguably the first "case study" of what might be expected from the increasing number of preferential trade agreements involving both developed and developing economies. Ten years after the treaty's inception, it is time to assess how its...</em>

Estimates of labor mobility costs are needed to assess the responses of employment and wages to trade shocks when factor adjustment is costly. Available methods to estimate those costs rely on panel data, which are seldom available in developing countries. We propose a method to estimate...

This paper explores the impact of structural reforms on a comprehensive set of macro-level labor-market outcomes, including the unemployment rate, the average wage index, and overall and female employment levels and labor force participation rates. Together these outcome variables capture the...