Trade costs such as applied tariffs, transportation and insurance costs are amplified as they pass through the multiple production steps associated with modern supply chains. This so called "cascade effect" arises since trade costs accumulate as intermediate goods are imported and then...

The article analyses the role of international supply chains as transmission channels of a financial shock. Because individual firms are interdependent and rely on each other, either as supplier of intermediate goods or client for their own production, an exogenous financial shock affecting a...

Globalization implies not only an expansion of international markets, but also an increasing vertical integration of industrial production processes. Intermediate products are increasingly offshored within these global value chains, giving place to what is known as quot;trade in tasksquot;. When...

This document analyses the past dynamics and the potential of economic growth in Latin America, using alternative methodological perspectives. Applying them to the regional situation at the end of the 1990-2002 economic cycle, the respective methods are used to review the medium term...

The paper analyzes the evolution of labor productivity in Latin America in the period 1960-2003, applying shift-share analysis to sectoral data. The results are compared with Asian countries. Unlike Asia, Latin American industry has not been able to assume fully its role as pole of development...

The contagious aspects of recent financial crises in emerging economies demonstrate the need to extend the domain of regional cooperation. This paper presents in a non-technical language the main concepts and challenges behind the coordination of macroeconomic policies in Latin America and the...

This article measures from a macroeconomic perspective, the degree of readiness of Central American countries to open their economies and join hemispheric integration schemes such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). A number of indicators are build on the fiscal, monetary, financial...

When firms trade in “tasks” rather than in final products, the weight of tariffs and transportation costs on factory prices and on international competitiveness is magnified. With goods crossing national borders many times before reaching the final consumer, these trading costs are also...

Building on a recent OECD-WTO data-set, the paper builds a typology of value-added traders according to their economic and trade policy characteristics. In the process, it defines clusters of countries according to the multi-dimensional criteria defined by value-added, economic and trade policy...

The geographical fragmentation of industrial production alters many of the stylized facts on which trade and trade-and-development models are based, with profound economic and social implications at home. The coexistence of three interconnected dimensions – product, income and finance – has...