Trade and Development

44 items available

Permanent URI for this collection

http://hdl.handle.net/10986/2173

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

Now showing 1 - 10 of 44

Deep Trade Agreements: Anchoring Global Value Chains in Latin America and the Caribbean

(Washington, DC : World Bank, 2022-07-12) Rocha, Nadia ; Ruta, Michele

International economic integration offers unexploited opportunities to Latin America and the Caribbean. This report studies how the region’s countries can leverage trade agreements to promote their economies’ participation in global value chains (GVCs).The gaps between potential and actual GVC integration follow from the region’s Economic fundamentals, such as geography, market size, institutions, and factor endowments. But policy choices matter as well. The report, based on new data and evidence, shows that trade agreements can drive policy reforms and help the region overcome some of its disadvantageous fundamentals. The report makes specific policy recommendations to guide Latin American and Caribbean countries in leveraging trade agreements to pursue greater international integration and economic growth. Four main findings emerge from the analysis: (i) Latin America and the Caribbean’s poor international integration and limited participation in GVCs have contributed to its low economic growth over the past decade; (ii) Although the region’s countries increasingly participate in preferential trade agreements (PTAs), there are gaps in the content of these agreements; (iii) Deep trade agreements present an avenue to promote trade and boost GVC integration and upgrading, thus contributing to improved economic performance; (iv) Four areas of deep integration - trade facilitation, regulatory cooperation, services, and state support - are priorities to improve these countries’ GVC participation and upgrading.
Trade Therapy: Deepening Cooperation to Strengthen Pandemic Defenses

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022) World Bank ; World Trade Organization

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the upsides and downsides of international trade in medical goods and services. Open trade can increase access to medical services and goods (and the critical inputs needed to manufacture them), improve quality and variety, and reduce costs. But excessive concentration of production, restrictive trade policies, supply chain disruptions, and regulatory divergence can jeopardize the ability of public health systems to respond to pandemics and other health crises. This report, coordinated by Nadia Rocha and Michele Ruta at the World Bank and Marc Bacchetta and Joscelyn Magdeleine at the WTO, provides new data on trade in medical goods and services and medical value chains; surveys the evolving policy landscape before and during the pandemic; and proposes an action plan to improve trade policies and deepen international cooperation to deal with future pandemics.
The Distributional Impacts of Trade: Empirical Innovations, Analytical Tools, and Policy Responses

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2021-05-19) Engel, Jakob ; Kokas, Deeksha ; Lopez-Acevedo, Gladys ; Maliszewska, Maryla

Trade is a well-established driver of growth and poverty reduction. But changes in trade policy also have distributional impacts that create winners and losers. It is vital to understand and clearly communicate how trade affects economic well-being across all segments of the population, as well as how policies can more effectively ensure that the gains from trade are distributed more widely. The Distributional Impacts of Trade: Empirical Innovations, Analytical Tools, and Policy Responses provides a deeper understanding of the distributional effects of trade across regions, industries, and demographic groups within countries over time. It includes an overview (chapter 1); a review of innovations in empirical and theoretical work covering the impacts of trade at the subnational level (chapter 2); highlights from empirical case studies on Bangladesh, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, and Sri Lanka (chapter 3); and a policy agenda to improve distributional outcomes from trade (chapter 4). This book comes at a time when the shock from COVID-19 (coronavirus) adds to an already uncertain trade policy environment in which the value of the multilateral trading system has been under increased scrutiny. A better understanding of how trade affects distributional outcomes can lead to more inclusive policies and support the ability of countries to maximize broad-based benefits from trade.
Effects of a Deeper Central European Free Trade Agreement

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2018-03-01) Mulabdic, Alen ; Ruta, Michele

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.
A Step Ahead: Competition Policy for Shared Prosperity and Inclusive Growth

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2017-06-27) World Bank ; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

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.
Making Global Value Chains Work for Development

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2016-06-06) Taglioni, Daria ; Winkler, Deborah

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.
Regulatory Assessment Toolkit : A Practical Methodology for Assessing Regulation on Trade and Investment in Services

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2014-03-12) Molinuevo, Martín ; Sáez, Sebastián

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.
Valuing Services in Trade : A Toolkit for Competitiveness Diagnostics

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014) Sáez, Sebastián ; Taglioni, Daria ; van der Marel, Erik ; Hollweg, Claire H. ; Zavacka, Veronika

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.
Exporting Services : A Developing Country Perspective

(World Bank, 2012) Goswami, Arti Grover ; Mattoo, Aaditya ; Sáez, Sebastián

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.
Trade Competitiveness Diagnostic Toolkit

(World Bank, 2012) Reis, Jose Guilherme ; Farole, Thomas

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.