It is sometimes claimed that free trade agreements (FTAs) between large countries and smaller developing countries serve as "policy anchors" by acting as a mechanism for the smaller developing country to make credible commitments to policy reform which they might not otherwise make. Such policy...

Many improvements have been proposed for the basic gravity model specification, most of which are confirmed by standard statistical tests due to the large number of observations often used to estimate such models. We use Monte Carlo experiments to examine situations in which features of models...

The global economic effects of eliminating certain significant categories of non-tariff measures (NTMs) are estimated in a CGE context. As a first step, a database of institutional information identifying alleged instances of NTMs for particular products and countries is constructed based on...

Data representing transshipment or re-exports are almost always excluded from analytical portrayals of international trade, yet transshipment is potentially an important phenomenon in understanding a number of economic questions, and is increasing in importance. Rapid technological change in...

China's reported exports to the United States have long been smaller than U.S.-reported imports from China. Earlier explanations for this focused on re-exports through Hong Kong, and appeared to account for most of the difference. Now, even after taking Hong Kong into account properly, there has...

In the literature on firm-level data, “gazelles” refer to rapidly-growing firms, which are of interest both because of their disproportionate contribution to employment and as an indicator of entrepreneurship. This paper makes three contributions: (1) It focuses on gazelles in China and...

This paper is an attempt to establish some stylized facts about the process of export diversification and structural change in exports for six key Latin American economies: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela. Our results show that there has been a long-run trend toward...

We develop a partial-equilibrium model for analyzing the effect of trade barriers and their removal on the level of foreign direct investment. These changes operate through three channels. Lowering barriers to the firms' exports and to their imports of intermediate goods tends to stimulate FDI,...

It has become increasingly common to produce goods in a number of geographically dispersed stages linked by international trade. This tendency, known by names such as “production fragmentation”, 'processing trade', and 'vertical specialization', has important implications for the analysis of...

It has become increasingly common to produce goods in a number of geographically dispersed stages linked by international trade. This tendency, known by names such as “production fragmentation,” “processing trade,” and “vertical specialization,” has important implications for the...