Person: Brenton, Paul
Trade and Regional Integration
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INTERNATIONAL TRADE, CLIMATE CHANGE, CARBON ACCOUNTING, TRADE POLICY
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Trade and Regional Integration
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Last updated: January 31, 2023
Biography
Paul Brenton is Lead Economist in the Trade and Regional Integration Unit of the World Bank. He focuses on analytical and operation work on trade and regional integration. He has led the implementation of World Bank lending operations such as the Great Lakes Trade Facilitation Project in DR Congo, Rwanda and Uganda. He co-authored the joint World Bank-WTO report on The Role of Trade in Ending Poverty and has managed a range of policy-oriented volumes including: De-Fragmenting Africa: Deepening Regional Trade Integration in Goods and Services; Africa can Help Feed Africa; and Carbon Footprints and Food Systems: Do Current Accounting Methodologies Disadvantage Developing Countries? Paul joined the World Bank in 2002, having previously been Senior Research Fellow and Head of the Trade Policy Unit at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels. Before that, he lectured in economics at the University of Birmingham in the UK. He has a PhD in Economics from the University of East Anglia. A collection of Paul’s work has been published in the volume International Trade, Distribution and Development: Empirical Studies of Trade Policies (https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/9172 ).
35 results
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Now showing 1 - 10 of 35
Publication Product Specific Technical Assistance for Exports--Has It Been Effective?(2009) Brenton, PaulThe international community is placing increasing emphasis on aid for trade to assist low income countries to integrate into the global economy and to address their domestic constraints to export driven growth. There is, however, scant information on the effectiveness of previous support for export development to inform the design of new initiatives. In this paper, we exploit information on product specific technical assistance for trade and estimate a simple partial equilibrium model to assess the impact on the key measurable outcome--exports of the product subject to assistance. We apply a difference in differences approach to isolate the impact of the policy interventions and draw four main conclusions: on average, export development (ED) programs have coincided with or predated stronger export performance; such programs appear to be more effective where there is already significant export activity; there is some concern about the additionality of the programs and that support may be being channeled to sectors that would have prospered anyway; ultimately, conclusions strongly depend on what one postulates would have happened in the absence of the policy intervention, so the definition of a credible counterfactual is of utmost importance for the evaluation of technical assistance for exports.Publication A Review of Cross-Border Trade in the Horn of Africa(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-06-21) Brenton, PaulThis paper provides a review of existing literature on cross-border trade among the Horn of African countries Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. It offers analysis on key traded products particularly food crops and livestock, a review on main trade routes and border marketing centers;the operation of cross-border value chains in the borderlands, including the economic impact on border communities and a summary of commonchallenges facing cross-border trade within the region. The review is augmented with analysis of available data on trade between these countriesfrom UN COMETRADE, FEWS NET and FAO.To put cross-border trade in context, the paper starts by reviewing the available information from officially recorded trade data.Publication Emerging Emitters and Global Carbon Mitigation Efforts(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-12) Cui, Can; Guan, Dabo; Wang, Daoping; Chemutai, Vicky; Brenton, PaulInternational efforts to avoid dangerous climate change have historically focused on reducing energy-related carbon-di-oxide (CO2) emissions from countries with the largest economies, including the EU and U.S., and/or the largest populations, such as, China and India. However, in recent years, emissions have surged among a different, much less-examined group of countries, raising the issue of how to address a next generation of high-emitting economies that need strong growth to reduce relatively high levels of poverty. They are also among the countries most at risk from the adverse impacts of climate change. Compounding the paucity of analyses of these emerging emitters, the long-term effects of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic on economic activity and energy systems remain unclear. Here, the authors analyze the trends and drivers of emissions in each of the fifty-nine developing countries whose emissions over 2010-2018 grew faster than the global average (excluding China and India), and then project their emissions under a range of pandemic recovery scenarios. Although future emissions diverge considerably depending on responses to Coronavirus (COVID-19) and subsequent recovery pathways, the authors find that emissions from these countries nonetheless reach a range of 5.1-7.1 Gt CO2 by 2040 in all their scenarios, substantially in excess of emissions from these regions in published scenarios that limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius . The authors results highlight the critical importance of ramping up mitigation efforts in countries that to this point have played a limited role in contributing the stock of atmospheric CO2 while also ensuring the sustained economic growth that will be necessary to eliminate extreme poverty and drive the extensive adaptation to climate change that will be required.Publication Carbon Labelling and Low-Income Country Exports: A Review of the Development Issues(2009) Brenton, Paul; Jensen, Michael FriisThis article discusses the carbon accounting and carbon-labelling schemes being developed to address growing concerns over climate change. Its particular concern is their impact on small stakeholders, especially low-income countries. The popular belief that trade is by definition problematic is not true; carbon efficiencies elsewhere in the supply chain may more than offset emissions from transportation. Indeed, low-income countries may offer important opportunities for carbon emission reductions because of their favourable climatic conditions and use of low energy-intensive production techniques. However, their effective inclusion in labelling schemes will require innovative solutions to provide low-cost data collection and certification.Publication Cereal Prices and Child Undernutrition in Ethiopia(Taylor and Francis, 2021-07-06) Brenton, PaulThis paper looks at how changing cereal prices affect child undernutrition in Ethiopia. It derives height for age (stunting) and weight for height (wasting) as indicators of child undernutrition from the two most recent years of the Livings Standards Measurement Survey and utilizes market prices for key cereals, teff, wheat, and maize at the enumeration area across all regions of the country. Using a panel data fixed effects model, the analysis finds that, contrary to previous studies, rising cereal prices are positively associated with improved child stunting rates for children between ages 6 months and 5 years. There is no evidence to suggest that cereal prices have a significantly greater impact on height for age for children that come from households who are net sellers of these crops. Cereal prices do not appear to be associated with wasting, which is a shorter-term negative health outcome.Publication Horn of Africa Regional Economic Memorandum: Overview(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-06-21) Brenton, Paul; Edjigu, Habtamu; Masaki, Takaaki; Sienaert, AlexisThe objective of this Regional Economic Memorandum (REM) is to strengthen the economic analysis available to policymakers on the challenges and opportunities for regional economic integration to support job creation and economic transformation in the Horn of Africa. It assesses the current state of regional economic integration, how policies and investments can deepen this integration, and how this could help to address the opportunities and challenges confronting the region. The analysis applies both an economic geography perspective (based on the 3Ds framework of the 2009 WDR – density, distance, and division) and the lens of the jobs and economic transformation (JET) agenda, whilst taking into account fragility and conflict and the region’s complex and evolving political economy. This overview synthesizes the key findings of the analysis conducted for the HoA REM, full details of which are presented in a series of Background Papers. The overview briefly describes key aspects of the region’s economy and development progress (Section 2). Next, in Section 3, it presents features of the economic geography of the region and some key results from economic modeling and transport connectivity analysis. The findings demonstrate the salience of the JET agenda in the Horn, and this and its implications are discussed in Section 4. Finally, Section 5 concludes by highlighting the main policy messages which emerge from the REM’s regional-level analysis.Publication What Explains the Low Survival Rate of Developing Country Export Flows?(World Bank, 2011-03-30) Brenton, Paul; von Uexkull, ErikSuccessful export growth and diversification require not only entry into new export products and markets but also the survival and growth of export flows. For a cross-country dataset of product-level bilateral export flows, exporting is found to be a perilous activity, especially in low-income countries. Unobserved individual heterogeneity in product-level export flow data prevails even when a wide range of observed country and product characteristics are controlled for. This questions previous studies that used the Cox proportional hazards model to analyze export survival. Following Meyer (1990), a Prentice-Gloeckler (1978) model is estimated, amended with a gamma mixture distribution summarizing unobserved individual heterogeneity. The empirical results confirm the significance of a range of product- as well as country-specific factors in determining the survival of new export flows. Important for policymaking is the finding of the value of learning-by-doing for export survival: experience with exporting the same product to other markets or different products to the same market is found to strongly increase the chance of export survival. A better understanding of such learning effects could substantially improve the effectiveness of export promotion strategies.Publication Impacts of the Rise of China on Developing Country Trade : Evidence from North Africa(2010) Brenton, PaulDespite the global financial and economic crisis, China has continued to experience strong export-driven growth and, indeed, became the world's largest exporting country in 2009. This rise of China in international markets presents African countries with growing competition in their home and export markets, but also with new opportunities. This paper focuses on the impacts of these developments on countries in North Africa, which are directly affected by the prominence of Chinese manufacturing. In particular, the analysis addresses two policy questions: first, is competition from China leading to substantial displacement of resources that incur significant adjustment costs while moving to new activities, or are there opportunities to exploit finer patterns of specialization that entail less disruption; and second, will policies that mitigate the impact of competition from China limit the longer-term capacity to exploit new opportunities in the global market? The findings from the empirical analysis suggest that policy makers can support North African producers in the increasingly fierce competition with China by reviewing the regulatory and incentives environment, reducing trade logistics costs, and broadening trade promotion efforts to non-traditional markets.Publication The Trade and Climate Change Nexus: The Urgency and Opportunities for Developing Countries(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2021-09-29) Brenton, Paul; Chemutai, VickyWhile trade exacerbates climate change, it is also a central part of the solution because it has the potential to enhance mitigation and adaptation. This timely report explores the different ways in which trade and climate change intersect. Trade contributes to the emissions that cause global warming and is itself also affected by climate change through changing comparative advantages. The report also confronts several myths concerning trade and climate change. The report focuses on the impacts of, and adjustments to, climate change in developing countries and on how future trade opportunities will be affected by both the changing climate and the policy responses to address it. The report discusses how trade can provide the goods and services that drive mitigation and adaptation. It also addresses how climate change creates immense challenges for developing countries, but also new opportunities to promote trade diversification in the transition to a low-carbon world. Suitable trade and environmental policies can offer effective economic incentives to attain both sustainable growth and poverty reduction.Publication Assessing the Adjustment Implications of Trade Policy Changes Using the Tariff Reform Impact Simulation Tool (TRIST)(2011) Brenton, Paul; Staritz, Cornelia; Von Uexkull, ErikTRIST is a simple, easy to use, country focused tool to assess the short-term adjustment implications of trade reform. It has been developed to improve the information available to policy makers in developing countries. It has the following key features: projections are based on revenues actually collected at the tariff line level rather than simply applying statutory rates, as in currently available tools; it is transparent, runs in Excel, with formulas and calculation steps visible to the user, and is open-source with users free to change, extend, or improve according to their needs; it has high policy relevance because it projects the impact of tariff reform on total fiscal revenue from imports (including VAT and excise taxes) and results are available at the product level so that sensitive products or sectors can be identified; the tool is flexible and can incorporate tariff liberalization scenarios involving any group of trading partners and any schedule of products. This paper describes the TRIST tool and provides a range of examples that demonstrate the insights that the tool can provide to policy makers on the short-term adjustment impacts of reducing tariffs.