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Ianchovichina, Elena Ivanova

Office of the Chief Economist, Latin America & Caribbean

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International Economics, Trade Policy

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Office of the Chief Economist, Latin America & Caribbean

Last updated April 4, 2023

Biography

Elena Ianchovichina joined the World Bank in 2000 as a Young Professional in the Development Research Group. Since then she has worked in the East Asia and Pacific Region and the Economic Policy and Debt Department, where she managed the program on inclusive growth. Since 2010 Elena has been a lead economist in the MNA Chief Economist Office, where she also served as acting regional chief economist. Her research covers a wide range of topics in development and international economics, including trade policy, economic growth, foreign investment, global general equilibrium modeling, natural resources, food security, inequality, and political violence. Elena is the author and coauthor of numerous publications, including several books and articles published in international refereed journals. Born in Bulgaria, she received her PhD from Purdue University in Indiana.

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 57

Impacts of China's Accession to the World Trade Organization

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2004-01) Ianchovichina, Elena ; Martin, Will

This article presents estimates of the impact of China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). China is estimated to be the biggest beneficiary (US$31 billion a year from trade reforms in preparation for accession and additional gains of $10 billion a year from reforms after accession), followed by its major trading partners that also undertake liberalization, including the economies in North America, Western Europe, and Taiwan (China). Accession will boost manufacturing sectors in China, especially textiles and apparel, which will benefit directly from the removal of export quotas. Developing economies competing with China in third markets may suffer small losses. Accession will have important distributional consequences for China, with the wages of skilled and unskilled nonfarm workers rising in real terms and relative to those of farm workers. Possible policy changes, including reductions in barriers to labor mobility and improvements in rural education, could more than offset these negative impacts and facilitate the development of China's economy.
Risky Business : Political Instability and Greenfield Foreign Direct Investment in the Arab World

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-12) Burger, Martijn ; Ianchovichina, Elena ; Rijkers, Bob

Which foreign direct investments are most affected by political instability? Analysis of quarterly greenfield investment flows into countries in the Middle East and North Africa from 2003 to 2012 shows that adverse political shocks are associated with significantly reduced investment inflows in the non-resource tradable sectors. By contrast, investments in natural resource sectors and non-tradable activities appear insensitive to such shocks. Consistent with these patterns, the significant reduction in investment inflows in Arab Spring affected economies was starkest in the non-resource manufacturing sector. Political instability is thus associated with increased reliance on non-tradables and aggravated resource dependence. Conversely, how intensified political instability affects aggregate foreign direct investment is critically contingent on the initial sector composition of these flows.
Trade Policy Analysis in the Presence of Duty Drawbacks

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2002-05) Ianchovichina, Elena

Duty drawback schemes, which typically involve a combination of duty rebates and exemptions, are a feature of many countries' trade regimes. They are used in highly protected developing economies as a means of providing exporters with imported inputs at world prices, thus increasing their competitiveness, while maintaining the protection on the rest of the economy. In China, duty exemptions have been central to the process of trade reform and have led to a tremendous increase in processed exports using imported materials. Despite the widespread use and importance of duty drawbacks, these new trade liberalization instruments have been given relatively little attention in empirical multilateral trade liberalization studies. The paper presents an empirical multi-region general equilibrium model, in which the effects of policy reform are differentiated based on the trade orientation of the firms. The model is useful for analyzing trade liberalization in the presence of duty drawbacks, assessing whether countries should introduce or abolish these types of arrangements, and evaluating the impact of improved duty drawback system administration. The author's analysis shows that failure to account for duty exemptions in the case of China's recent WTO accession will overstate the increase in China's trade flows by 40 percent, welfare by 15 percent, and exports of selected sectors by as much as 90 percent. The magnitude of the bias depends on the level of pre-intervention tariffs and the size of tariff cuts-the larger the initial distortions and tariff reductions, the larger the bias when duty drawbacks are ignored. The bias in the estimates of China's real GDP, trade flows, and welfare changes due to WTO accession increases more than three times when China's pre-intervention tariffs are raised from their 1997 levels to the much higher 1995 levels. These results suggest that trade liberalization studies-focusing on economies in which protection is high, import concessions play an important role, and planned tariff cuts are deep-must treat duty drawbacks explicitly to avoid serious errors in their estimates of sectoral output, trade flows, and welfare changes.
Surges and Stops in FDI Flows to Developing Countries : Does the Mode of Entry Make a Difference?

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-02) Burger, Martijn J. ; Ianchovichina, Elena I.

This paper investigates the factors associated with foreign direct investment "surges" and "stops," defined as sharp increases and decreases, respectively, of gross foreign direct investment inflows to the developing world and differentiated based on whether these events are led by waves in greenfield investments or mergers and acquisitions. Greenfield-led surges and stops occur more frequently than mergers and acquisitions-led ones and different factors are associated with the onset of the two types of events. Global liquidity is the only factor significantly associated with a surge, regardless of its kind, while decline in global economic growth and a surge in the preceding year are the only predictors of a stop. Greenfield-led surges and stops are more likely in low-income and resource-rich countries than elsewhere. Global growth, financial openness, and domestic economic and financial instability enable mergers and acquisitions-led surges. These results differ from those in the literature on surges and stops and are particularly relevant in countries where foreign direct investments dominate capital flows.
Unrestricted Market Access for Sub-Saharan Africa : How Much Is It Worth and Who Pays?

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2001-04) Ianchovichina, Elena ; Mattoo, Aaditya ; Olarreaga, Marcelo

The European Union (EU), Japan, and the United States (US) have recently announced initiatives to improve market access for the poorest countries. The authors assess the impact on Sub-Saharan Africa of these initiatives, and others that might be taken. They find that fully unrestricted access to all the Quad countries (Canada, The EU, Japan, and the US) would produce substantial gains for Sub-Saharan Africa, leading to a fourteen percent increase in non-oil exports ($ 2.5 billion), and boosting real incomes by about one percent ($ 1.8 billion). Most of these gains would come from preferential access to the highly protected Japanese, and European agricultural markets, especially the heavily protected Japanese market for meat, and certain cereal grains. The smallness of Sub-Saharan Africa's trade ensures that the costs of trade diversion for the Quad, other developing countries, and the world, would be on the whole, negligible. One concern, however, is that preferential access to protected markets might lead Sub-Saharan Africa to produce goods in which it does not have a global comparative advantage, and the future erosion of these preferences might lead to adjustment costs.
The Impact of China's WTO Accession on East Asia

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-08) Ianchovichina, Elena ; Walmsley, Terrie

China's World Trade Organization (WTO) accession will have major implications for China and present both opportunities and challenges for East Asia. Ianchovichina and Walmsley assess the possible channels through which China's accession to the WTO could affect East Asia and quantify these effects using a dynamic computable general equilibrium model. China will be the biggest beneficiary of accession, followed by the industrial and newly industrializing economies (NIEs) in East Asia. But their benefits are small relative to the size of their economies and to the vigorous growth projected to occur in the region over the next 10 years. By contrast, developing countries in East Asia are expected to incur small declines in real GDP and welfare as a result of China's accession, mainly because with the elimination of quotas on Chinese textile and apparel exports to industrial countries China will become a formidable competitor in areas in which these countries have comparative advantage. With WTO accession China will increase its demand for petrochemicals, electronics, machinery, and equipment from Japan and the NIEs, and farm, timber, energy products, and other manufactures from the developing countries in East Asia. New foreign investment is likely to flow into these expanding sectors. The overall impact on foreign investment is likely to be positive in the NIEs, but negative for the less developed East Asian countries as a result of the contraction of these economies' textile and apparel sector. As China becomes a more efficient supplier of services or a more efficient producer of high-end manufactures, its comparative advantage will shift into higher-end products. This is good news for the poor developing economies in East Asia, but it implies that the impact of China's WTO accession on the NIEs may change to include heightened competition in global markets.
Long-Run Impacts of China's WTO Accession on Farm-Nonfarm Income Inequality and Rural Poverty

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-05) Anderson, Kym ; Huang, Jikun ; Ianchovichina, Elena

Many fear China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) will impoverish its rural people by way of greater import competition in its agricultural markets. Anderson, Huang, and Ianchovichina explore that possibility bearing in mind that, even if producer prices of some (land-intensive) farm products fall, prices of other (labor-intensive) farm products could rise. Also, the removal of restrictions on exports of textiles and clothing could boost town and village enterprises, so demand for unskilled labor for nonfarm work in rural areas may grow even if demand for farm labor in aggregate falls. New estimates, from the global economywide numerical simulation model known as GTAP, of the likely changes in agricultural and other product prices as a result of WTO accession are drawn on to examine empirically the factor reward implications of China's WTO accession. The results suggest farm-nonfarm and Western-Eastern income inequality may well rise in China but rural-urban income inequality need not. The authors conclude with some policy suggestions for alleviating any pockets of farm household poverty that may emerge as a result of WTO accession.
Economic Impacts of China's Accession to the World Trade Organization

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-05) Ianchovichina, Elena ; Martin, William

Ianchovichina and Martin present estimates of the impact of accession by China and Chinese Taipei to the World Trade Organization. China is estimated to be the biggest beneficiary, followed by Chinese Taipei and their major trading partners. Accession will boost the labor-intensive manufacturing sectors in China, especially the textiles and apparel sector that will benefit directly from the removal of quotas on textiles and apparel exports to North America and Western Europe. Consequently, developing economies competing with China in third markets may suffer relatively small losses. China has already benefited from the reforms undertaken between 1995 and 2001 (US$31 billion) and trade reforms after accession will lead to additional gains of around $US10 billion. Accession will have important distributional consequences for China, with wages of skilled workers and unskilled nonfarm workers rising in real terms and relative to farm incomes. Reduction in agricultural protection may hurt some farmers. Possible policy changes considered to offset these impacts include reductions in barriers to labor mobility and improvements in rural education. The authors estimate that the removal of the hukou system would raise farm wages and allow 28 million workers to migrate to nonfarm jobs. If, in addition, there is an increase in education spending that results in a percentage point increase in the annual skilled labor growth rate, approximately 32 million farm workers would leave their job for jobs in the nonfarm sectors. These policies would not only facilitate the evolution of China's economy toward high-technology manufacturing and services, they have the potential to much more than offset any negative impacts of accession on rural wages and rural incomes generally.
Trade Reform and Household Welfare : The Case of Mexico

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2001-08) Ianchovichina, Elena ; Nicita, Alessandro ; Soloaga, Isidro

The authors use a two-step, computationally simple procedure to analyze the effects of Mexico's potentially unilateral tariff liberalization. First, they use a computable general equilibrium model provided by the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) as the new price generator. Second, they apply the price changes to Mexican household data to assess the effects of the simulated policy on poverty and income distribution. By choosing GTAP as the price generator, the authors are able to model Mexico's differential tariff structure appropriately: almost zero for North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) members and higher tariffs for nonmembers. Even starting with low tariff protection, simulation results show that tariff reform will have a positive effect on welfare for all expenditure deciles. Under an assumption of nonhomothetic individual preferences, trade liberalization benefits people in the poorer deciles more than those in the richer ones.
Trade Liberalization in China's Accession to the World Trade Organization

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2001-06) Ianchovichina, Elena ; Martin, Will

Before reform, China's trade was dominated by a few foreign trade corporations with monopolies on the trade of specific ranges of products. Planners could control imports through these corporations so there was little need for conventional instruments such as tariffs, quotas, and licenses. Trade reforms increased the range of enterprises eligible to trade in specific commodities and led to the development of indirect new trade instruments, such as duty exemptions. Duty exemptions almost completely liberalized the imports of intermediate inputs used to produce exports and investment goods used in joint ventures with foreign enterprises. Comprehensive liberalization measures in China's World Trade Organization (WTO) accession package will help ease this problem as tariff reduction reduces the costs of domestic inputs to exporters. WTO commitments will also lead to the abolition of most nontariff barriers and of quotas on textiles and clothing. With accession, China's share of world exports may almost double between 1995 and 2005 - an estimate that is smaller than those found in studies that do not incorporate duty exemptions. (Duty exemptions were a form of partial liberalization, so any further reduction in protection will boost trade volume less than some estimate.) With reform, labor-intensive industries are expected to grow most, especially exports of apparel. Wages of unskilled worker should rise.