From the mid-1950s to 1990, sub-Saharan Africa's share of global exports fell from 3.1 to under 1.2 percent, a decline that implies associated export earning losses of about $65 billion annually. Previous studies show that foreign trade barriers do not account for this poor performance. Indeed,...

Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and Uruguay undertook extensive trade reform at a time of crisis, at which time institutional reform was difficult to undertake. Many of the countries had become members of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in the late...

Raw materials inventories in the manufacturing sector in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s were two to five times as high in developing countries as in the United States, despite the fact that in most developing countries real interest rates are at least twice as high. Given the high cost of capital...

Economists have long recognized that richer countries trade more among themselves than with poorer economies due to a closer match of exporter supply structures and importer preferences. In the literature, the closeness of supply and demand has traditionally been determined by the quality of...

Containerization and modern bulk handling methods can substantially increase ship and labor productivity. This paper argues that many ports have failed to change their labor practices and to accept the inevitable reduction in their labor force that technological advances call for. Those ports...

With containerized shipping, maritime transport has changed profoundly. Among other things, it has shifted from labor-intensive to more capital-intensive activities, including larger specialized ships that require substantial investments in port infrastructure and equipment. Integrated transport...

Services have a direct impact on the competitiveness of the goods sector. This paper illustrates the importance of logistics services, their trade dimension, and how regulatory issues act as perhaps one of the most significant barriers to competitiveness. The paper discusses recent developments...

Sound infrastructure is critical for growth in East Africa. During 1995-2005, improvements in infrastructure boosted growth by one percentage point per year, due largely to wider access to information and communication technologies (ICTs). Although power infrastructure sapped growth in other...

The authors present a new database of minimum distance road routes connecting 138 cities in 27 countries across Europe and Central Asia. They use it to show that improved road network quality is robustly associated with higher intraregional trade flows. Gravity model simulations suggest that an...

The trade performance of countries in South Asia over the past two decades has been poor relative to other regions. Exports from South Asia have doubled over the past 20 years to approximately USD 100 billion. In contrast, East Asia's exports grew ten times over the same period. The low level of...