The authors provide new evidence on the impacts of trade reforms on wages and wage inequality in developing countries. While most of the current literature on the topic achieves identification by comparing outcomes before and after one episode of trade liberalization across industries, they...

This paper explores an empirical methodology to assess the impacts of trade reforms on household behavior in developing countries. It focuses on consumption and income responses: when price reforms take place, households modify consumption and production decisions and local labor markets adjust....

The Zambian cotton sector went through significant reforms during the 1990s. After a long period of parastatal control, a process of liberalization in cotton production and marketing began in 1994. These reforms were expected to benefit agricultural farmers. In Zambia, these are rural, often...

This paper provides new evidence on the impacts of trade reforms on wages. We first introduce a model of trade that combines a noncompetitive wage-setting mechanism due to unions with a factor abundance hypothesis. The predictions of the model are then econometrically investigated using...

Porto investigates the poverty impacts of informal export barriers like transport costs, cumbersome customs practices, costly regulations, and bribes. He models these informal barriers as export taxes that distort the efficient allocation of resources. In low-income agricultural economies, this...

In 2003, after claims of dumping, the U.S. imposed heavy tariffs on imports of catfish from Vietnam. As a result, Vietnamese exports of catfish to the U.S. market sharply declined. Using a panel data of Vietnamese households, we explore the responses of catfish producers in the Mekong delta...

This paper studies nonmarket institutions that facilitate exports. In Malawi, as in many other developing countries, farmers face numerous constraints that disconnect them from export markets. The paper explores the role of a local institution, the burley tobacco clubs, in bridging smallholders...

This paper estimates the impacts of world agricultural trade liberalization on wages, employment and unemployment in Argentina, a country with positive net agricultural exports and high unemployment rates. In the estimation of these wage and unemployment responses, the empirical model allows for...

This paper explores the role of export costs in the process of poverty reduction in rural Africa. The authors claim that the marketing costs that emerge when the commercialization of export crops requires intermediaries can lead to lower participation into export cropping and, thus, to higher...