Trade agreements and health in developing countries

Trade agreements and health in developing countries.

Politicians champion free trade for bringing an era of high and stable growth, although the evidence supporting such claims is ambiguous. Studies that associate increases in trade with increases in gross domestic product often leave open questions of causality: high growth, the result for instance of strong industrial policies, typically leads to more trade. China and India's growth spurts prec...

Mega‐regional trade Agreements: Costly distractions for developing countries?

Small Countries and Preferential Trade Agreements

This paper examines the welfare implications of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) from the perspective of small countries in the context of a multi-country, general equilibrium model. We calibrate our model to represent one relatively small country and two symmetric big countries. We consider two cases. In one case, the small country is an “innocent bystander,” that is, it is left out of a P...

The Company You Keep: How Membership in Regional Trade Agreements Affects Investor Risk in Developing Countries

This paper seeks to establish empirically that institutions matter to financial markets. To this end, I look at the impact of five different regional trade agreements (RTAs) on a composite of four different financial instruments that account for default risk on sovereign debt in developing countries. As expected, some of the agreements have a stronger impact on default risk than others. Althoug...

Trade Facilitation in Developing Countries

Measures to actively facilitate trade are increasingly seen as essential to assist developing countries in expanding trade and benefiting from globalisation. Although often viewed as narrowly concerned with the ease and speed of Customs procedures, even greater trade cost reductions and trade and welfare benefits may be reaped from a broader view of trade facilitation (TF) that incorporates tra...