High levels of trade costs persist in the world trading system, despite recent progress in tariff reduction, trade facilitation, and logistics. At least some of these costs can be attributed to non-tariff measures (NTMs), policies imposed by governments other than ordinary customs duties which...

Interest in the expansion of e-commerce as a driver for economic development, especially ecommerce across borders, has intensified in recent years. While there is an apparent widespread consensus on the environmental factors necessary to promote e-commerce in developing countries, the basis of...

This paper introduces a new, publicly available database for tracking merchandise trade in the global value chains for apparel/textile/footwear, motor vehicles and parts, and electronics, developed originally for in-depth analysis at the country level. The data enable tracking of intermediate...

The Russian Federation's regions not only have highly uneven degrees of development, they also have very uneven degrees of foreign orientation. Regions with the highest foreign orientation--exports of goods per capita or inbound foreign direct investment per capita—almost across the board have...

This paper assesses issues relating to tariffs and nontariff measures (NTMs) in relation to Russia's World Trade Organization (WTO) and Eurasian Customs Union (ECU) commitments. The analysis finds that full implementation of Russia's WTO tariff schedule through 2020, would raise goods imports by...

This paper assesses and compares economic impacts of four actual and potential free trade agreements in the Asia-Pacific Region; Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP, sometimes also called TPP-11), the original Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP-12), the...

The Kyrgyz Republic has experienced modest and volatile economic expansion since the economy bottomed out from the transition recession in 1995, when GDP amounted to about half of its pre-independence levels. As a result of structural reforms at the start of transition, the emergence of...

This paper seeks to present a unified framework for several factors that have been independently studied as determinants of unit values in international trade: product differentiation by quality (which suggests that unit values should be positively correlated with exporters' per capita income),...

We construct measures of export similarity among seventeen Latin American countries over the period 1962-1991. Based on cluster analyses, we analyze patterns of similarity or complementarity in the commodity composition of various countries1 export portfolios. While exports of primary products...