doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1596/40367

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Mattoo, Aaditya

Office of the Chief Economist, East Asia and Pacific, The World Bank

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Office of the Chief Economist, East Asia and Pacific, The World Bank

Last updated: December 23, 2024

Biography

Aaditya Mattoo is Chief Economist of the East Asia and Pacific Region of the World Bank. He specializes in development, trade and international cooperation, and provides policy advice to governments. He is also Co-Director of the World Development Report 2020 on Global Value Chains. Prior to this he was the Research Manager, Trade and Integration, at the World Bank. Before he joined the Bank, Mr. Mattoo was Economic Counsellor at the World Trade Organization and taught economics at the University of Sussex and Churchill College, Cambridge University. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Cambridge, and an M.Phil in Economics from the University of Oxford. He has published on development, trade, trade in services, and international trade agreements in academic and other journals and his work has been cited in the Economist, Financial Times, New York Times, and Time Magazine.

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 80

Geopolitics and the World Trading System
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-23) Mattoo, Aaditya; Ruta, Michele; Staige, Robert W.
Until the beginning of this century, the GATT/WTO system worked. Economic research provided a compelling explanation. It showed that if governments maximize the well-being of their own countries broadly defined, GATT/WTO principles would facilitate mutually beneficial cooperation over their trade policy choices. Now heightened geopolitical rivalry seems to have undermined the WTO. A simple transposition of the previous rationalization suggests that geopolitics and trade cooperation are not compatible. The paper shows that this is only true if rivalry eclipses any consideration of own-country well-being. In all other circumstances, there are gains from trade cooperation even with geopolitics. Furthermore, the WTO’s relevance is in question only if it adheres too rigidly to its existing rules and norms. Through measured adaptation to the geopolitical imperative, the WTO can continue to thrive as a forum for multilateral trade cooperation in the age of geopolitics.
Fixing the Foundation: Teachers and Basic Education in East Asia and Pacific
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-09-20) Afkar, Rythia; Béteille, Tara; Breeding, Mary E.; Linden, Toby; Mason, Andrew D.; Mattoo, Aaditya; Pfutze, Tobias; Sondergaard, Lars M.; Yarrow, Noah
Countries in middle-income East Asia and the Pacific were already experiencing serious learning deficits prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-related school disruptions have only made things worse. Learning poverty -- defined as the percentage of 10-year-olds who cannot read and understand an age-appropriate text -- is as high as 90 percent in several countries. Several large Southeast Asian countries consistently perform well below expectations on adolescent learning assessments. This report examines key factors affecting student learning in the region, with emphasis on the central role of teachers and teaching quality. It also analyzes the role education technologies, which came into widespread use during the pandemic, and examines the political economy of education reform. The report presents recommendations on how countries can strengthen teaching to improve learning and, in doing so, can enhance productivity, growth, and future development in the region.
Technological Decoupling? The Impact on Innovation of US Restrictions on Chinese Firms
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-23) Cao, Yu; De Nicola, Francesca; Mattoo, Aaditya; Timmis, Jonathan
Recent U.S.-China tensions have raised the specter of technological decoupling. This paper examines the impact of U.S. export restrictions and technology licensing on Chinese firms’ innovation. It finds that U.S. sanctions reduce the quantity and quality of patent outputs of targeted Chinese firms, primarily due to decreased collaboration with U.S. inventors. However, firms with higher initial patent stock or in sectors with a smaller technological distance to the U.S. are less affected. Sanctions in specific technology fields lead to a decline in the patent output of both Chinese firms with U.S. collaborators and U.S. firms with Chinese collaborators.
Implications of Heightened Global Uncertainty for the East Asia and Pacific Region
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-08-26) Ha, Jongrim; Islamaj, Ergys; Mattoo, Aaditya
Macroeconomic, financial, and policy-related uncertainty have increased since the COVID-19 pandemic globally and in individual developing economies in the East Asia and Pacific (EAP) region. Uncertainty shocks can transmit across borders and their economic consequence is quite sizeable, affecting both the financial sector and the real economy in the EAP region.
Trade Effects of Industrial Policies: Are Preferential Agreements a Shield?
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-06-17) Barattieri, Alessandro; Mattoo, Aaditya; Taglioni, Daria
This paper explores the effects of industrial policy on trade, focusing on the role of preferential trade agreements. The analysis uses data for the period 2012–2022 on detailed product-level bilateral trade, industrial policy announcements, and rules on subsidies in different preferential trade agreements. The introduction of a new industrial policy measure in a destination market reduces export growth to that market on average by about 0.28 percent. However, exports from fellow members of preferential trade agreements are not adversely affected and may even be positively affected if the agreements have deep disciplines on subsidies. These findings suggest that preferential trade agreements have a shielding effect against the trade distorting effects of industrial policies.
Handbook of Deep Trade Agreements
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020-07-08) Rocha, Nadia; Ruta, Michele; Mattoo, Aaditya; Mattoo, Aaditya; Rocha, Nadia; Ruta, Michele
Deep trade agreements (DTAs) cover not just trade but additional policy areas, such as the international flows of investment and labor, and the protection of intellectual property rights and the environment. Their goal is integration beyond trade, or deep integration. DTA rules influence how countries transact, invest, work, and, ultimately, develop. The rules and commitments in DTAs should be informed by evidence and shaped by development priorities rather than international power or domestic politics. An impediment to this goal is that data and analysis on trade agreements have not captured the new dimensions of integration. Little effort has been made to identify the content and consequences of DTAs. This Handbook takes a step towards filling this gap in our understanding of international economic law and policy. It presents detailed data and analysis on the content of the policy areas most frequently covered in DTAs, focusing on the stated objectives, substantive commitments, and other aspects such as transparency, procedures, and enforcement. Each chapter, authored by lead experts in their respective fields, explains in detail the methodology used to collect the information and provides a first look at the evidence by policy area.
Africa in the New Trade Environment: Market Access in Troubled Times
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-02-10) Coulibaly, Souleymane; Kassa, Woubet; Zeufack, Albert G.; Mattoo, Aaditya; Coulibaly, Souleymane; Kassa, Woubet; Zeufack, Albert G.
Sub-Saharan Africa represents only a small share of global production and trade while hosting half of the extreme poor worldwide. To catch up with the rest of the world, the continent has no alternative: it must undertake reforms to scale up its supply capacity while better linking its production and trade to the global economy. If it does so, it stands to gain from unlimited demand and innovation along the supply chain. Some progress has been made over the past decade, with the region’s exports and imports growing rapidly. Because most African economies rely heavily on trade for a large share of national income, they will also be more vulnerable to the trade disruptions of external shocks, as illustrated by the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Africa in the New Trade Environment: Market Access in Troubled Times provides a comprehensive, state-of-the-art analysis by a team of renowned trade economists who present a strategy to bolster Sub-Saharan Africa’s market access in the current global environment.
Natural Disasters and the Reshaping of Global Value Chains
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-06) Freund, Caroline; Mulabdic, Alen; Ruta, Michele; Mattoo, Aaditya
To understand the longer term consequences of natural disasters for global value chains, this paper examines trade in the automobile and electronic sectors after the 2011 earthquake in Japan. Contrary to widespread expectations, the analysis shows that the shock did not lead to reshoring, nearshoring, or diversification; and trade in intermediate products was disrupted less than trade in final goods. Imports did shift to new suppliers, especially where dependence on Japan was greater. But production relocated to developing countries rather than to other top exporters. Despite important differences, the observed pattern of switching may be relevant to disasters like the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Road Not Taken?: Responding to the Energy Price Shock in East Asia
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-11-17) Pollitt, Hector; Islamaj, Ergys; Kitchlu, Rahul; Le, Duong Trung; Mattoo, Aaditya
Several countries in East Asia have increased fossil fuel subsidies to keep consumer prices lower than currently high international prices. These subsidies are discouraging the shift in consumption away from fossil fuels, while high prices are encouraging investment in new fossil fuel infrastructure. Providing income transfers instead of price subsidies would encourage consumption of cleaner alternatives, while softening the welfare loss. And subsidizing investment in renewables would avert the risk of being locked in to fossil fuels. The total cost need not be higher than that of fossil fuel subsidies.
The Evolution of Deep Trade Agreements
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06) Rocha, Nadia; Ruta, Michele; Mattoo, Aaditya
This paper presents new data on the content of preferential trade agreements. The data contain detailed information on the 18 policy areas most frequently covered in preferential trade agreements, focusing on the stated objectives, substantive commitments, and other aspects such as transparency, procedures, and enforcement. Several new stylized facts emerge: (i) preferential trade agreements have reduced trade-weighted average tariff rates to less than 5 percent for more than two-thirds of countries; (ii) the number of commitments in preferential trade agreements has increased over time, particularly since the 2000s and in areas aiming at facilitating flows of services, goods, and capital; (iii) deepening commitments have been accompanied by an increase in regulatory requirements, namely on enforcement; (iv) developing countries tend to have fewer commitments in preferential trade agreements, with larger gaps in areas such as labor and the environment; and (v) preferential trade agreements are more similar within blocs, but similarity can be significant even across blocs. The paper also discusses the challenges of quantification of preferential trade agreements "depth" and its effects and proposes a research agenda for future work on trade agreements.