Publication: Trade Liberalization, Firm Performance, and Labor Market Outcomes in the Developing World : What Can We Learn from Micro-Level Data?
Loading...
Published
2003-05
ISSN
Date
2014-05-09
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
reviews the micro-level evidence on the effects of trade and investment liberalization in the developing world. He focuses, in particular, on the effects of the 1991 trade reform in India since it provides an excellent controlled experiment in which the effects of a drastic trade regime change can be measured. His main findings are: 1) There is evidence of trade-induced productivity gains (in this respect, however, India is an exception. 2) These gains mainly stem from intra-industry reallocation of resources among firms with different productivity levels. 3) The gains are larger in import-competing sectors. 4) There is no evidence of significant scale efficiency gains. Unilateral trade liberalization is often associated with a reduced scale efficiency. 5) There is evidence of a pro-competitive effect of trade liberalization. 6) There is no evidence either of learning-by-exporting effects or of beneficial spillover effects from foreign-owned to local firms active in the same sectors. 7) There is evidence, however, of positive vertical spillovers from foreign direct investment. 8) There is evidence of skill upgrading induced either by technology imports or by trade-induced reallocations of market shares in favor of plants with higher skill-intensity. 9) There is no evidence of trade-induced increases in labor demand elasticities. But direct evidence suggests that trade exposure raises wage volatility. 10) There is no evidence of substantial employment contraction in import-competing sectors.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Epifani, Paolo. 2003. Trade Liberalization, Firm Performance, and Labor Market Outcomes in the Developing World : What Can We Learn from Micro-Level Data?. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 3063. © http://hdl.handle.net/10986/18220 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Publication The Economic Value of Weather Forecasts: A Quantitative Systematic Literature Review(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-09-10)This study systematically reviews the literature that quantifies the economic benefits of weather observations and forecasts in four weather-dependent economic sectors: agriculture, energy, transport, and disaster-risk management. The review covers 175 peer-reviewed journal articles and 15 policy reports. Findings show that the literature is concentrated in high-income countries and most studies use theoretical models, followed by observational and then experimental research designs. Forecast horizons studied, meteorological variables and services, and monetization techniques vary markedly by sector. Estimated benefits even within specific subsectors span several orders of magnitude and broad uncertainty ranges. An econometric meta-analysis suggests that theoretical studies and studies in richer countries tend to report significantly larger values. Barriers that hinder value realization are identified on both the provider and user sides, with inadequate relevance, weak dissemination, and limited ability to act recurring across sectors. Policy reports rely heavily on back-of-the-envelope or recursive benefit-transfer estimates, rather than on the methods and results of the peer-reviewed literature, revealing a science-to-policy gap. These findings suggest substantial socioeconomic potential of hydrometeorological services around the world, but also knowledge gaps that require more valuation studies focusing on low- and middle-income countries, addressing provider- and user-side barriers and employing rigorous empirical valuation methods to complement and validate theoretical models.Publication It’s Not (Just) the Tariffs: Rethinking Non-Tariff Measures in a Fragmented Global Economy(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-10-22)As tariffs have declined, non-tariff measures (NTMs) have become central to trade policy, especially in high-income countries and regulated sectors like food and green technologies. Although NTMs may serve legitimate goals, they could also sort countries and firms into or out of markets based on compliance capacity and differences in product mix. Documenting recent advances in the estimation of ad valorem equivalents (AVEs), this paper uncovers new patterns of use and exposure of NTMs. High-income countries rely more heavily on NTMs relative to tariffs, while low- and middle-income countries face steeper AVEs on their exports. Firm-level evidence shows that NTMs disproportionately affect smaller firms, leading to market exit and concentration. Poorly designed NTMs can harm productivity and welfare, while coordinated, capacity-aware use can deliver inclusive outcomes. Policy design, transparency, and diagnostics must evolve to reflect the growing role—and risks—of NTMs in a fragmented global trade landscape.Publication Monitoring Global Aid Flows: A Novel Approach Using Large Language Models(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-11-04)Effective monitoring of development aid is the foundation for assessing the alignment of flows with their intended development objectives. Existing reporting systems, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Creditor Reporting System, provide standardized classification of aid activities but have limitations when it comes to capturing new areas like climate change, digitalization, and other cross-cutting themes. This paper proposes a bottom-up, unsupervised machine learning framework that leverages textual descriptions of aid projects to generate highly granular activity clusters. Using the 2021 Creditor Reporting System data set of nearly 400,000 records, the model produces 841 clusters, which are then grouped into 80 subsectors. These clusters reveal 36 emerging aid areas not tracked in the current Creditor Reporting System taxonomy, allow unpacking of “multi-sectoral” and “sector not specified” classifications, and enable estimation of flows to new themes, including World Bank Global Challenge Programs, International Development Association–20 Special Themes, and Cross-Cutting Issues. Validation against both Creditor Reporting System benchmarks and International Development Association commitment data demonstrates robustness. This approach illustrates how machine learning and the new advances in large language models can enhance the monitoring of global aid flows and inform future improvements in aid classification and reporting. It offers a useful tool that can support more responsive and evidence-based decision-making, helping to better align resources with evolving development priorities.Publication The Macroeconomic Implications of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Options(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29)Estimating the macroeconomic implications of climate change impacts and adaptation options is a topic of intense research. This paper presents a framework in the World Bank's macrostructural model to assess climate-related damages. This approach has been used in many Country Climate and Development Reports, a World Bank diagnostic that identifies priorities to ensure continued development in spite of climate change and climate policy objectives. The methodology captures a set of impact channels through which climate change affects the economy by (1) connecting a set of biophysical models to the macroeconomic model and (2) exploring a set of development and climate scenarios. The paper summarizes the results for five countries, highlighting the sources and magnitudes of their vulnerability --- with estimated gross domestic product losses in 2050 exceeding 10 percent of gross domestic product in some countries and scenarios, although only a small set of impact channels is included. The paper also presents estimates of the macroeconomic gains from sector-level adaptation interventions, considering their upfront costs and avoided climate impacts and finding significant net gross domestic product gains from adaptation opportunities identified in the Country Climate and Development Reports. Finally, the paper discusses the limits of current modeling approaches, and their complementarity with empirical approaches based on historical data series. The integrated modeling approach proposed in this paper can inform policymakers as they make proactive decisions on climate change adaptation and resilience.Publication The State of Global Services Trade Policies: Evidence from Recent Data(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-10-28)The economic environment for services trade has changed dramatically over the past 15 years, driven by rapid technological progress that has expanded the possibilities for exchanging services. How has trade policy responded to these changes? How do policy stances in a wide range of service sectors compare across economies? With its unprecedented global coverage, the Services Trade Policy Database and the associated Services Trade Restrictions Index, developed jointly by the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, help address these questions. This paper makes three principal contributions. First, it offers an in-depth discussion of the current state of services trade policies and their differences across 134 economies and 34 services subsectors. Second, the paper reveals how recent (2016–22) changes in policy stances have seen progressive liberalization by lower-income economies but stabilization or even slight policy reversals in high-income economies. This dynamic differs fundamentally from the trend that unfolded after the Great Recession over 2008–16. Third, the paper shows the implications of policy changes over the past six years on services trade costs, and it showcases how the Services Trade Policy Database’s regulatory information can inform trade negotiations, regulatory analysis, and policy making. Alongside these contributions, the paper documents updates to the Services Trade Policy Database’s economy and sector coverage and explains the latest methodological improvements made to the World Bank–World Trade Organization Services Trade Restrictions Index.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Assessment of Costs and Benefits of the Customs Union for Kazakhstan(World Bank, 2012-01-03)In 2010, Kazakhstan entered into a customs union with Belarus and Russia. The first, relatively easy step in the implementation of the customs union was accomplished in 2010 with the adoption of a common external tariff, with varying exceptions in each of the three member countries. It is the intention of the customs union to eliminate the exceptions, in phases, by 2015. In fact, the goals of the customs union are much more ambitious than implementation of the common external tariff. The governments of the member countries are working to achieve deep integration in key areas. Clearly, successfully addressing the challenge of reducing trade-facilitation costs is a major task that requires significant institutional development both in Kazakhstan and in the other member countries of the customs union. It is very difficult, however, to assess the probability of success that the customs union will have with the reduction of these costs.Publication Deep Trade Policy Options for Armenia : The Importance of Services, Trade Facilitation and Standards Liberalization(2011-05-01)This paper develops an innovative 21 sector computable general equilibrium model of Armenia to assess the impact on Armenia of a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement with the European Union, as well as further regional or multilateral trade policy commitments. The analysis finds that such an agreement with the European Union will likely result in substantial gains to Armenia, but shows that the gains derive from the deep aspects of the agreement. In order of importance, the sources of the gains are: (i) trade facilitation and reduction in border costs; (ii) services liberalization; and (iii) standards harmonization. A shallow agreement with the European Union that focuses only on preferential tariff liberalization in goods will likely lead to small losses to Armenia primarily due to a loss of productivity from lost varieties of technologies from the rest of the world region in manufactured products. Additional gains can be expected in the long run from an improvement in the investment climate. The authors estimate only small gains from a services agreement with countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States, but significant gains from expanding services liberalization multilaterally.Publication The Challenge of Reducing International Trade and Migration Barriers(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-04)While barriers to trade in most goods and some services including capital flows have been reduced considerably over the past two decades, many remain. Such policies harm most the economies imposing them, but the worst of the merchandise barriers (in agriculture and textiles) are particularly harmful to the world's poorest people, as are barriers to worker migration across borders. This paper focuses on how costly those anti-poor trade policies are, and examines possible strategies to reduce remaining distortions. Two opportunities in particular are addressed: completing the Doha Development Agenda process at the World Trade Organization (WTO), and freeing up the international movement of workers. A review of the economic benefits and adjustment costs associated with these opportunities provides the foundation to undertake benefit/cost analysis required to rank this set of opportunities against those aimed at addressing the world's other key challenges as part of the Copenhagen Consensus project. The paper concludes with key caveats and suggests that taking up these opportunities could generate huge social benefit/cost ratios that are considerably higher than the direct economic ones quantified in this study, even without factoring in their contribution to alleviating several of the other challenges identified by that project, including malnutrition, disease, poor education and air pollution.Publication Quantifying the Impact of Services Liberalization in a Developing Country(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2004-01)The authors consider how service liberalization differs from goods liberalization in terms of welfare, the level and composition of output, and factor prices within a developing economy, in this case Tunisia. Despite recent movements toward liberalization, Tunisian service sectors remain largely closed to foreign participation and are provided at high cost relative to many developing nations. The authors develop a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of the Tunisian economy with multiple products and services and three trading partners. They model goods liberalization as the unilateral removal of product tariffs. Restraints on services trade involve both restrictions on cross-border supply (mode 1 in the GATS) and on foreign ownership through foreign direct investment (mode 3 in the GATS). The former are modeled as tariff-equivalent price wedges while the latter are comprised of both monopoly-rent distortions (arising from imperfect competition among domestic producers) and inefficiency costs (arising from a failure of domestic service providers to adopt least-cost practices). They find that goods-trade liberalization yields a gain in aggregate welfare and reorients production toward sectors of benchmark comparative advantage. However, a reduction of services barriers in a way that permits greater competition through foreign direct investment generates larger welfare gains. Service liberalization also requires lower adjustment costs, measured in terms of sectoral movement of workers, than does goods-trade liberalization. And it tends to increase economic activity in all sectors and raise the real returns to both capital and labor. The overall welfare gains of comprehensive service liberalization amount to more than 5 percent of initial consumption. The bulk of these gains come from opening markets for finance, business services, and telecommunications. Because these are key inputs into all sectors of the economy, their liberalization cuts costs and drives larger efficiency gains overall. The results point to the potential importance of deregulating services provision for economic development.Publication Rules of Thumb for Evaluating Preferential Trading Arrangements : Evidence from Computable General Equilibrium Assessments(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-10)Most interesting results on the welfare effects of regional arrangements are ambiguous at a theoretical level. Many questions only have quantitative answers that are specific to the particular structural features of the economy and the policy considered. So, to determine the impact of prospective regional arrangements governments often rely on a quantitative evaluation. Usually at the request of client governments of the World Bank, the authors have implemented many computable general equilibrium (CGE) models to inform policymakers. The authors summarize the main conclusions drawn from these studies. The principal conclusions are: 1) Countries excluded from a preferential trade arrangement almost always lose. 2) Market access is a key determinant of the net benefits of a preferential trade arrangement. 3) With a free trade agreement (FTA) the external tariff can be lowered such that a poor FTA becomes attractive. 4) For Southern countries, North-South agreements offer a beneficial increase in competition in their home markets, and involve little increase in the supply price of Northern country sales in Southern countries. 5) Multilateral trade liberalization results in significantly larger gains to the world than the network of regional arrangements. 6) For individual countries without high protection, "additive regionalism" will likely result in substantially larger gains than unilateral trade liberalization. 7) Tax replacement requirements reduce the set of desirable regional arrangements. 8) Trade taxes are often an inefficient source of tax revenue. 9) Trade liberalization should be expected to be pro-poor in developing countries, but results will be diverse at the household level so safety nets are important. 10) Dynamic effects to reverse conclusions regarding regionalism are not expected.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Design Thinking for Social Innovation(2010-07)Designers have traditionally focused on enchancing the look and functionality of products.Publication Government Matters III : Governance Indicators for 1996-2002(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-08)The authors present estimates of six dimensions of governance covering 199 countries and territories for four time periods: 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002. These indicators are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 25 separate data sources constructed by 18 different organizations. The authors assign these individual measures of governance to categories capturing key dimensions of governance and use an unobserved components model to construct six aggregate governance indicators in each of the four periods. They present the point estimates of the dimensions of governance as well as the margins of errors for each country for the four periods. The governance indicators reported here are an update and expansion of previous research work on indicators initiated in 1998 (Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobat 1999a,b and 2002). The authors also address various methodological issues, including the interpretation and use of the data given the estimated margins of errors.Publication Governance Matters VIII : Aggregate and Individual Governance Indicators 1996–2008(2009-06-01)This paper reports on the 2009 update of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) research project, covering 212 countries and territories and measuring six dimensions of governance between 1996 and 2008: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. These aggregate indicators are based on hundreds of specific and disaggregated individual variables measuring various dimensions of governance, taken from 35 data sources provided by 33 different organizations. The data reflect the views on governance of public sector, private sector and NGO experts, as well as thousands of citizen and firm survey respondents worldwide. The authors also explicitly report the margins of error accompanying each country estimate. These reflect the inherent difficulties in measuring governance using any kind of data. They find that even after taking margins of error into account, the WGI permit meaningful cross-country comparisons as well as monitoring progress over time. The aggregate indicators, together with the disaggregated underlying indicators, are available at www.govindicators.org.Publication Breaking the Conflict Trap : Civil War and Development Policy(Washington, DC: World Bank and Oxford University Press, 2003)Most wars are now civil wars. Even though international wars attract enormous global attention, they have become infrequent and brief. Civil wars usually attract less attention, but they have become increasingly common and typically go on for years. This report argues that civil war is now an important issue for development. War retards development, but conversely, development retards war. This double causation gives rise to virtuous and vicious circles. Where development succeeds, countries become progressively safer from violent conflict, making subsequent development easier. Where development fails, countries are at high risk of becoming caught in a conflict trap in which war wrecks the economy and increases the risk of further war. The global incidence of civil war is high because the international community has done little to avert it. Inertia is rooted in two beliefs: that we can safely 'let them fight it out among themselves' and that 'nothing can be done' because civil war is driven by ancestral ethnic and religious hatreds. The purpose of this report is to challenge these beliefs.Publication Governance Matters IV : Governance Indicators for 1996-2004(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-06)The authors present the latest update of their aggregate governance indicators, together with new analysis of several issues related to the use of these measures. The governance indicators measure the following six dimensions of governance: (1) voice and accountability; (2) political instability and violence; (3) government effectiveness; (4) regulatory quality; (5) rule of law, and (6) control of corruption. They cover 209 countries and territories for 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2004. They are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 37 separate data sources constructed by 31 organizations. The authors present estimates of the six dimensions of governance for each period, as well as margins of error capturing the range of likely values for each country. These margins of error are not unique to perceptions-based measures of governance, but are an important feature of all efforts to measure governance, including objective indicators. In fact, the authors give examples of how individual objective measures provide an incomplete picture of even the quite particular dimensions of governance that they are intended to measure. The authors also analyze in detail changes over time in their estimates of governance; provide a framework for assessing the statistical significance of changes in governance; and suggest a simple rule of thumb for identifying statistically significant changes in country governance over time. The ability to identify significant changes in governance over time is much higher for aggregate indicators than for any individual indicator. While the authors find that the quality of governance in a number of countries has changed significantly (in both directions), they also provide evidence suggesting that there are no trends, for better or worse, in global averages of governance. Finally, they interpret the strong observed correlation between income and governance, and argue against recent efforts to apply a discount to governance performance in low-income countries.