Trade and Development
44 items available
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The Trade and Development Series seeks to provide objective, accessible information about the new trade agenda. Titles in the series cover a wide range of topics, from regional trade agreements and customs reform to agriculture, intellectual property rights, services, and other key issues currently being discussed in World Trade Organization negotiations. Contributors to the series represent some of the world’s leading thinkers and specialists on international trade issues. Titles in this series undergo internal and external review under the management of the Trade Group's Advisory Board in the World Bank's Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network.
Items in this collection
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Publication
Effects of a Deeper Central European Free Trade Agreement
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2018-03-01)This paper studies the economic effects of ‘deepening’ the Central European Free Trade Agreement (CEFTA). It combines new information on the content of trade agreements with gravity model estimates of the impact of deep trade agreements, agreements that go beyond the elimination of tariffs and other border restrictions. The analysis suggests that CEFTA is a relatively shallow trade agreement as it covers mostly policy areas under the current WTO mandate. The estimated trade impacts of CEFTA on member countries are relatively modest, varying between 0.02 and 7.4 percent. CEFTA’s members would gain from simultaneously deepening their integration reciprocally and vis-a-vis the EU. In particular, a trade agreement with the EU similar to the EU-Norway agreement could increase total exports by CEFTA members between 4 and 27 percent. -
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A Step Ahead: Competition Policy for Shared Prosperity and Inclusive Growth
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2017-06-27)Sustainable economic development has played a major role in the decline of global poverty in the past two decades. There is no doubt that competitive markets are key drivers of economic growth and productivity. They are also valuable channels for consumer welfare. Competition policy is a powerful tool for complementing efforts to alleviate poverty and bring about shared prosperity. An effective competition policy involves measures that enable contestability and firm entry and rivalry, while ensuring the enforcement of antitrust laws and state aid control. Governments from emerging and developing economies are increasingly requesting pragmatic solutions for effective competition policy implementation, as well as recommendations for pro-competitive sectoral policies. A Step Ahead: Competition Policy for Shared Prosperity and Inclusive Growth puts forward a research agenda that advocates the importance of market competition, effective market regulation, and competition policies for achieving inclusive growth and shared prosperity in emerging and developing economies. It is the result of a global partnership and shared commitment between the World Bank Group and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Part I of the book brings together existing empirical evidence on the benefits of competition for household welfare. It covers the elimination of anticompetitive practices and regulations that restrict competition in key markets and highlights the effects of competition on small producers and employment. Part II of the book focuses on the distributional effects of competition policies and how enforcement can be better aligned with shared prosperity goals. -
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Making Global Value Chains Work for Development
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2016-06-06)Economic, technological, and political shifts as well as changing business strategies have driven firms to unbundle production processes and disperse them across countries. Thanks to these changes, developing countries can now increase their participation in global value chains (GVCs) and thus become more competitive in agriculture, manufacturing and services. This is a paradigm shift from the 20th century when countries had to build the entire supply chain domestically to become competitive internationally. For policymakers, the focus is on boosting domestic value added and improving access to resources and technology while advancing development goals. However, participating in global value chains does not automatically improve living standards and social conditions in a country. This requires not only improving the quality and quantity of production factors and redressing market failures, but also engineering equitable distributions of opportunities and outcomes - including employment, wages, work conditions, economic rights, gender equality, economic security, and protecting the environment. The internationalization of production processes helps with very few of these development challenges. Following this perspective, Making Global Value Chains Work for Development offers a strategic framework, analytical tools, and policy options to address this challenge. The book conceptualizes GVCs and makes it easier for policymakers and practitioners to discuss them and their implications for development. It shows why GVCs require fresh thinking; it serves as a repository of analytical tools; and it proposes a strategic framework to guide policymakers in identifying the key objectives of GVC participation and in selecting suitable economic strategies to achieve them. -
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Regulatory Assessment Toolkit : A Practical Methodology for Assessing Regulation on Trade and Investment in Services
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2014-03-12)Regulatory Assessment Toolkit: A Practical Methodology for Assessing Regulation on Services Trade and Investment provides guidance on how to assess and reform the regulatory policies of service trade industries. The toolkit can help government officials evaluate whether their regulatory framework addresses market failures, achieves public interest goals in an efficient manner, and promotes the development of an efficient domestic services market. Depending on the circumstances and the needs of the authorities, the toolkit can serve different purposes, including supporting regulatory reform, improving regulatory governance, negotiating and implementing trade agreements, and streamlining regulations to attract foreign investment. The Regulatory Assessment Toolkit will be of particular interest to policy makers and government officials from regulatory bodies, experts at development banks and donor agencies, and academics and researchers in the field of economic regulation. -
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Valuing Services in Trade : A Toolkit for Competitiveness Diagnostics
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014)The Service Trade Competitiveness Diagnostic (STDC) Toolkit is part of a larger agenda of trade competitiveness work developed by the World Bank’s International Trade Unit in recent years. Services are a key input in countries’ trade competitiveness, as well as a new source of trade diversification, making it critical to understand what factors and main constraints matter most for services competitiveness. The Toolkit provides a framework, guidelines, and set of practical tools to conduct a thorough analysis and diagnostic of trade competitiveness in the services sector with a methodology that sheds light on a country’s ability both to export services and improve its export performance through policy change. This Toolkit is designed to be used in a modular way. Either a full country diagnostic can be undertaken or various parts of the toolkit can be used to address specific questions of interest, whether they pertain to existing services performance, the potential for expansion and growth in services trade, or policy options to increase competitiveness in services trade. The output of an STCD can be used to assess either the overall performance of a country’s services sector or the performance of individual sub-sectors. This Toolkit complements the analytical framework for trade in goods provided by the Trade Competitiveness Diagnostic Toolkit (World Bank, 2012), and allows policymakers and experts in developing countries to better integrate services into their overall trade strategies. In addition, it will also be of interest to international organizations and development practitioners in both policymaking institutions and academia. -
Publication
Exporting Services : A Developing Country Perspective
(World Bank, 2012)The book builds on previous research, including that by the World Bank, on trade in services. Such research includes analyses of the effect of liberalizing services in developing countries and sectoral studies on financial, transportation, telecommunication, and professional services, as well as on international negotiations. The conceptual framework for this book is based on the existing literature on the service sector (Francois and Hoekman 2010; Hoekman and Mattoo 2008). Recognizing the heterogeneity in both, economic structure of developing countries and their service exports, this book takes an eclectic approach to identifying successful strategies. Chapter two surveys the literature on determinants of service exports and presents an illustrative empirical model that synthesizes the available models on trade in services. Because trade data on services are scarce and have a number of weaknesses, rigorous econometric analysis has serious limits. The subsequent chapters of the book examine the determinants of trade in services through case studies of the experiences of countries with varying degrees of success. The book analyzes service export performance for the following countries: Brazil, Chile, the Arab Republic of Egypt, India, Kenya, Malaysia, and the Philippines. The countries were selected on the basis of their performance in global trade (especially trade in services), their regional role, and the availability of data and because they have consciously pursued policies to promote service exports. -
Publication
Trade Competitiveness Diagnostic Toolkit
(World Bank, 2012)This Trade Competitiveness Diagnostic (TCD) toolkit provides a framework, guidelines, and practical tools needed to conduct an analysis of trade competitiveness. The toolkit can be used to assess the competitiveness of a country's overall basket of exports, as well as specific traded sectors. It includes guidance on a range of tools and indicators that can be used to analyze trade performance in terms of growth, orientation, diversification, quality, and survival, as well as quantitative and qualitative approaches to analyze the market and supply-side factors that determine competitiveness. The toolkit facilitates the identification of the main constraints to improved trade competitiveness and the policy responses to overcome these constraints. The output of a TCD initiative can be used for a wide variety of purposes. The TCD toolkit is intended for policy makers and practitioners involved in analysis of trade performance and design of trade and industrial policy. -
Publication
Trade Finance during the Great Trade Collapse
(World Bank, 2011-06-22)The bursting of the subprime mortgage market in the United States in 2008 and the ensuing global financial crisis were associated with a rapid decline in global trade. The extent of the trade collapse was unprecedented: trade flows fell at a faster rate than had been observed even in the early years of the great depression. G-20 leaders held their first crisis-related summit in November 2008. The goal was to understand the root causes of the global crisis and to reach consensus on actions to address its immediate effects. In the case of trade, a key question concerned the extent to which a drying up of trade finance caused the observed decline in trade flows. This book brings together a range of projects and studies undertaken by development institutions, export credit agencies, private bankers, and academics to shed light on the role of trade finance in the 2008-09 great trade collapse. It provides policy makers, analysts, and other interested parties with analyses and assessments of the role of governments and institutions in restoring trade finance markets. A deeper understanding of the complexity of trade finance remains critical as the world economy recovers and the supply of trade finance improves. The international community continues to know too little about the fragility of low income economies in response to trade finance developments and shocks, as well as about the ability and conditions of access to trade finance by small and medium enterprises and small banks in developing countries. Similarly, there is uncertainty regarding the impact on trade finance of recent changes in the third Basel regulatory framework. -
Publication
Managing Openness : Trade and Outward-oriented Growth After the Crisis
(World Bank, 2011-03-22)The global financial crisis is stimulating a broad reassessment of economic integration policies in developed and developing countries alike. The crisis was associated with a great trade collapse, the sharpest in recorded history and the deepest since Second World War (Baldwin 2009). The trade collapse affected all countries and products, although to different extents. While signs of recovery are starting to solidify, deeper questioning of the causes of the crisis and the merits of globalization has surfaced. The emergence of China and the imbalances of its trade with the United States are shaking the stability of the global system. Are these imbalances sustainable, or do they need to be adjusted to avoid another global crisis? What impact will these adjustments have on the trade of developing countries if they mean that China consumes more and the United States saves more? Openness has helped support growth in many countries, to unprecedented levels in Brazil, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, and others. Yet today many are concerned that openness is creating vulnerability, and vulnerability can hurt growth. No one believes that inward orientation is the solution or that domestic consumption alone can boost growth, even in large countries. The longer-term benefits of openness more than compensate for the short-term negative impacts of trade shocks. The question is not whether to remain open but rather what kind of safety and insurance systems, at the micro and macro levels, to put in place to better hedge against shocks from globalization. As developing countries try to find answers to these questions, they also face a drastically changed trade environment. The crisis proved that protectionism is no longer the name of the game; it remained largely under control thanks to a solid multilateral regime as well as to a new system of production sharing across countries, which does not lend itself naturally to broad-based protectionism. Moreover, the role of South-South trade is growing, giving developing countries new opportunities to export and new opportunities to import cheaper capital goods, now produced in countries like China or India, that allow them to industrialize faster. Thus, while outward-oriented growth is here to stay, it needs to be put in a different perspective and packaged with additional policies. As the world emerges from the crisis, the author expect to see the development of an 'export-led growth version 2.0' model that reflects these new dynamics. -
Publication
Preferential Trade Agreement Policies for Development : A Handbook
(World Bank, 2011)Regional integration is increasingly recognized as a key avenue for promoting economic growth and reducing poverty. Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have become a central instrument of regional integration in all parts of the world. Beyond market access and the progressive elimination of barriers at the border, PTAs are increasingly being used to address a host of behind-the-border issues, also known as 'deep integration' issues, in order to promote cooperation in the areas of investment, trade facilitation, competition policy, and government procurement, as well as wider social issues related to the regulation of the environment and the protection of labor and human rights. The purpose of this handbook is to explore the various ways in which policy makers and trade negotiators in the developing world can limit the costs and maximize the benefits of their regional integration efforts. PTAs have become a cornerstone of the international trade system. The surge in their number and scope is fast reshaping the architecture of the world trading system and the trading environment of developing countries. The integration of these diverse agreements into a multilateral framework that facilitates the expansion of trade is likely to be one of the main challenges facing the world trading system in the coming years. This handbook offers an introduction to the complex world of modern PTAs. It follows in the steps of earlier, seminal World Bank publications on the economics and practice of PTAs, notably new dimensions in regional integration, trade blocs, and regional integration and development. Supplementing these earlier publications, this volume aims at taking its audience beyond the traditional market access paradigm to consider more broadly and systematically the numerous regulatory policy dimensions that are contained in modern PTAs. In particular, it offers a framework for understanding a number of behind-the-border policies typically covered in PTAs, including labor mobility, investment, trade facilitation, competition, and government procurement, as well as other societal and more normative policies related to intellectual property, environment, labor rights, and human rights. These latter are increasingly among the policies driven by powerful trading blocs as they strive to influence developing countries and the evolution of the global trading system. The handbook is also inspired by the numerous requests received by the World Bank from developing countries or groups of developing countries worldwide for advice on PTAs, including those currently being negotiated, as an aid in understanding the obligations and the possible economic and development implications of various provisions.