Countries are increasingly turning to non-tariff barriers that are hard to measure and often illegal under WTO rules. What are the impacts of these policies, and what do they reveal about market power in international trade? We study a comprehensive system of discretionary import licenses...

We develop a method to measure the incidence of monopolistic markup distortions in the global economy. Using semi-parametric formulas, we measure how trade modifies the deadweight loss of markups through two channels: (1) trade-induced change in markup dispersion, and (2) international...

In the "neutrality years" 1793-1807 and beyond, U.S. merchants drew on Spanish-American silver to finance their carrying trade and to settle deficits with Europe and the Far East. The size and direction of these payments must remain unknown, because no records of silver flows were kept until...

The weak performance of the Brazilian merchant marine is surprising, as a huge external sector is normally expected to go hand in hand with the development of a national merchant marine. To elucidate this question, the article proposes an analysis and discussion of the development of the...

The main objective of this study is to investigate empirically the effect of free or preferential trade agreements (PTAs) on Pakistan's export performance (value of exports, number of exporters and number of products per exporter) during the period 2003 to 2010. The analysis covers the South...

This study empirically examines a connection between non-tariff measures (NTMs) and trade response at a micro level. It investigates the mechanism, drivers and speed of adjustment to a battery of sanitary and phytosanitary measures and technical barriers to trade. It uses an administrative...

Do export promotion agencies (EPAs) impact the probability of non-exporting firms to export? In the last decade many countries have introduced EPAs to support their firrms in order to deal with asymmetric information problems and make feasible additional gains from trade. Some recent studies...

This paper presents the services trade restrictiveness indices (STRIs) for logistics services. The STRIs are composite indices taking values between zero and one, zero representing an open market and one a market completely closed to foreign services providers. The indices are calculated for 40...