In a rapidly changing trade environment, marked by economic slowdown and impasse in the Doha Round, the success of the WTO in promoting and legitimizing the rules-based multilateral trading system rests, to a large extent, on maintaining effective relations with civil society, including...

In a rapidly changing trade environment, marked by economic slowdown and impasse in the Doha Round, the success of the WTO in promoting and legitimizing the rules-based multilateral trading system rests, to a large extent, on maintaining effective relations with civil society, including...

In a rapidly changing trade environment, marked by economic slowdown and impasse in the Doha Round, the success of the WTO in promoting and legitimizing the rules-based multilateral trading system rests, to a large extent, on maintaining effective relations with civil society, including...

This paper analyses the role of services in international trade through the lens of global value chains (GVCs). Services account for more than 70% of world GDP but only for around 20% of world trade in balance of payments terms. In value added terms, accounting for services embodied in exported...

This paper develops new estimates of export quality, far more extensive than previous efforts, covering 178 countries and hundreds of products during the period 1962-2010. It finds that quality upgrading is particularly rapid during the early stages of development, with the process largely...

The WTO's plurilateral Information Technology Agreement (ITA) reduced tariffs to zero on many IT products. This paper presents a comprehensive study of its trade impacts by incorporating recent insights from both the global value chain (GVC) and time in trade literatures. Inserting tariffs...

Discussions about international capital movements raise extremely important and controversial questions. Why should countries open up their capital accounts, especially considering that unrestricted international capital movement is a relatively new phenomenon? For example, many OECD countries...

Two issues stand out in this conversation. The first concerns the unfinished business of the global fight against the scourge of poverty, which impacts one region more than most: Africa. At the same time, a key pre-requisite for economic performance - affordable and efficient public...

Do WTO commitments reduce the risk of trade policy reversals? To address this question, we rely on the theoretical model of varying cooperative tariffs by Bagwell and Staiger (1990) to specify our empirical model for the probability of a tariff increase. We then study how WTO tariff commitments...

Building on the results of the OECD-WTO Trade in Value-Added TiVA database, the paper analyses the evolution of effective protection in about 50 developed and developing countries from 1995 to 2008. The paper reviews also the role of preferential agreements on effective protection as well as the...