Growth, Inequality and Poverty Relationships This paper examines the causal relationship between inequality and a number of macroeconomic variables frequently found in the inequality and growth literature. These include growth, openness, wages, and liberalisation. We review the existing cross-country empirical evidence on the effects of inequality on growth and the extent to which the poorest i...

This paper evaluates the research that has taken place on intra-industry trade (IIT) since the publication of Grubel and Lloyd’s pioneering volume on the subject in 1975. The evaluation of the development of the literature is organised around the themes of measurement, explanation and policy. The paper identifies significant progress on all these themes. We now have a robust theoretical framewo...

This paper examines the e↵ects of liquidity on the demand for imports of non-durable consumers’ goods in Trinidad and Tobago. A parsimonious vector equilibrium correction model (VEqCM) is used to test the hypotheses that liquidity has both longand short-run e↵ects. The multivariate cointegration approach of Johansen and Juselius (1990) is used to determine long-run relations and general to spec...

This paper provides empirical evidence for the interaction between firm-level total factor productivity and trade liberalization as key determinants of firm-level job destruction caused by trade. We also test some key theoretical predictions from Melitz (2003), whose model is used to derive an explicit equation relating firm productivity and trade-induced labor layoff when a country liberalizes...

This paper investigates the two-way relationship between R&D and export activity. In particular, we concern ourselves with the question whether R&D stimulates exports and, perhaps more importantly, whether export activity leads to increasing innovative activity in terms of R&D (learning by exporting). We use two unique firm level databases for Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland and compa...

Can part of Africa’s current underdevelopment be explained by its slave trades? To explore this question empirically, I combined data from ship records with data from various historical documents reporting slave ethnicities, and construct estimates of the number of slaves exported from each country during Africa’s slave trades between 1400 and 1900. I find a strong robust negative correlation b...

This paper discusses the political economy behind the principal trade policy decisions in Russia since independence. I discuss why export restraints were widely employed in the early transition years and why the export quotas proved more difficult to remove than anticipated. Why it was so difficult to resolve the monetary basis for the collapse in trade among the newly independent states. Why t...

We study the effects of reforms in the legal scope of patent rights (PRs) on the international pattern of sectoral exports, before and after implementation of the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement at the World Trade Organization (WTO), in a generalized factor-proportions framework. We find that, conditional on factor endowments and intensities, a country wi...

We study how opening to trade affects economic growth in a model where heterogeneous firms can adopt new technologies already use by other their home country. characterize the rate using summary statistic of profit distribution: mean-min ratio. Opening increases spread through increased export opportunities and foreign competition, induces more rapid technology adoption, generates faster growth...

INTRA-INDUSTRY TRADE AS AN INDICATOR OF LABOR MARKET ADJUSTMENT A growing body of recent empirical research uses measures of change in intra-industry trade as indicators of labor market adjustment. In this paper, we argue that the theoretical foundations for this work are problematic. To make this argument we develop a simple model with both interand intra-industry trade and adjustment. We defi...