This (revised) study seeks to examine the rise, expansion, and ultimate decline of the Italian wool-based textile industries over a period of six centuries (from ca. 1100 to ca. 1730). An international trade model combining transaction costs and comparative advantage is employed to explain the...

The article summarises the main lessons of the Bank’s 2010 conference which focused on international trade and foreign direct investment. The research is based on a microeconomic approach to the behaviour of Belgian firms, with reference to developments in the scientific literature on the...

This paper documents the construction of BACI, our international trade database, which covers more than 200 countries and 5,000 products, between 1994 and 2007. New approaches have been developed to reconcile data reported by almost 150 countries to the United Nations Statistics Division,...

TradeProd, the CEPII trade, production and bilateral protection database, provides an updated version of the worldwide data used in Mayer and Zignago (2005), and available on CEPII's website. The database contains three groups of information covering 28 industrial sectors in the ISIC...

The purpose of this paper is to inform the contemporary policy debate on promoting trade among developing countries (South–South trade) by analyzing trade patterns of developing Asian economies from a comparative global perspective. The paper begins with a stage-setting historical overview of...

The present paper aims to disseminate how liberalisation processes were conducted around the globe and especially in Europe since the XIXth century up to date. The research objective is to review the liberalisation of trade dynamics and create an image of the architecture of the most important...

The steady spread of preferential trade agreements is not a new phenomenon in the multilateral trading system. Striking is, however, the outstanding dynamics of the new bilateral and regional initiatives among the traditional trading powers - the EU, U.S. and Japan - in the most recent period....

We use 6-digit bilateral trade data to document the effect of WTO/GATT membership on the extensive and intensive product margins of trade. We construct gravity equations for the two product margins motivated by Chaney (2008). The empirical results show that standard gravity variables provide...

This paper extends the literature on trade liberalization and firm productivity (TFP) by examining the complementarities between the speed of contract enforcement and the productivity gains from input tariff liberalization. It does so by using firm-level panel data from India along with an...

This study examines the development of trade between ASEAN and New Zealand. Indices of trade intensity and trade potential are used to analyse the intensity of existing trade for the period 1980~2010 and trade potential going forward. This is the first use of the trade potential method to assess...