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Economic activity in many African countries remains highly concentrated and exports are often dominated by mineral resources or a few primary products. The World Bank’s 2011 report on light manufacturing in Africa identified poor trade logistics performance as a constraint that especially penalized African exporters that relied on imported inputs, very often making them uncompetitive. The report highlighted research that demonstrated how poor logistics added roughly a 10 percent production cost penalty in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Zambia across the five subsectors of light manufacturing where opportunities were identified as greatest in Africa. The report outlined how in Africa poor trade logistics increase production costs (often wiping out the labor cost advantage) and lead to long and unreliable delivery times, making local firm’s unattractive suppliers to lead firms in global value chains (GVCs), particularly for light manufacturing. This note seeks to contribute to a review of progress in achieving export diversification through greater exports of light manufacturing products. It looks at recent trends in the exports of the five categories of light manufacturing identified as having strong potential in Africa. The note reviews progress in improving trade logistics in Sub-Saharan Africa, with a focus on the three countries highlighted in the light manufacturing study: Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Zambia, and additionally Kenya and Uganda.

The main message of this report is that if Kazakhstan wants to take advantage of global integration and diversification opportunities, the government needs to improve its trade policy framework, its management, and its regulations. It is also finalizing accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) while its trade strategy includes a number of free trade agreements to be negotiated. It is an active member of the Central Asia Region Economic Cooperation (CAREC). This report is composed of three policy notes that discuss how to improve the trade policy framework, management, and regulations: note one is on the trade policy framework and recommends joining the WTO on a tariff schedule that is more liberal than Russia’s; note two postulates that to benefit more fully from the WTO membership and future regional or bilateral agreements, the institutional framework for trade policy management will need a clearer strategic vision, better coordination within the government and with private sector, and enhanced human capacity; and note three suggests that for the private sector to benefit from global integration and diversification, the government should ease the burden of regulations that affect trade (non-tariff measures (NTMs)).

Although Brazil has become one of the largest economies in the world, it remains among the most closed economies as measured by the share of exports and imports in gross domestic product. This feature cannot be explained simply by the size of Brazils economy. Rather, it is due to an economic structure reliant on domestic value chain integration as opposed to participation in global production networking. It also reflects more generally an export base that shows lack of dynamism. Opening up and moving toward integration into global value chains could produce efficiency gains and help Brazil address its productivity and competitiveness challenges.

This paper examines the implications of the terms-of-trade theory for the determinants of outcomes arising under the enforcement provisions of international agreements. Like original trade agreement negotiations, the paper models formal trade dispute negotiations as potentially addressing the terms-of-trade externality problem that governments implement import protection above the globally efficient level so as to shift some of the policys costs to trading partners. The approach is to extend earlier theoretical models of trade agreement accession negotiations to the setting of enforcement negotiations in order to guide the empirical assessment. The paper uses instrumental variables to estimate the model on trade volume outcomes from World Trade Organization (WTO) disputes over 1995–2009. The evidence is consistent with theoretical predictions that larger import volume outcomes are associated with products that have smaller increases in foreign exporter-received prices (terms-of-trade losses for the importer) as a result of the dispute, larger pre-dispute import volumes, larger import demand elasticities, and smaller foreign export supply elasticities. Dispute settlement outcome differences are also explained by variation in institutionally-motivated measures of retaliation capacity and the severity of the free-rider problem associated with foreign exporter concentration.

Trade is essential for Caribbean countries development and poverty reduction. Given their small market size, they are dependent on exports to produce manufactured products at efficient scale. And given their natural amenities, they rely on tourism as a major spur to economic activity. Trade in the Caribbean thus makes an essential contribution to increasing employment and reducing poverty by supporting growth. At the same time, the high dependence on trade also makes Caribbean economies vulnerable to external shocks. For example, the global financial crisis imposed substantial job losses in sectors such as tourism that the poor rely on for employment. This report employs several different, but complementary, empirical approaches to analyzing the impact of this emerging new trade environment on shared prosperity in the Caribbean. These include the following six topics, with each corresponding to an individual chapter: (i) assessment of the Caribbean s performance in reaping the opportunities offered by the new trade environment; (ii) identification of the main determinants of Caribbean countries trade performance; (iii) discussion of the role of innovation and access to keys services in improving the productivity of exporting firms; (iv) exploration of how regional integration and other trade agreements could boost Caribbean trade performance; (v) firm-level examination of the implications of trade for employment; and (vi) identification of which households are involved in international trade and the implications of trade for their socio-economic status.

This report reviews the status of Maghreb countries' economic integration with the world, with the Arab world, and within the Maghreb itself. It focuses on trade in goods and services, labor and capital flows, financial integration and cross-border infrastructure integration. It discusses the potential benefits of and key constraints to greater integration. The focus on trade liberalization with the European Union (EU) provides an opportunity for individual Maghreb countries to lock in policies that would eventually help them harmonize policies within their own region. The same argument can be made regarding accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). The Maghreb countries would reap significant additional benefits if, in parallel to reforms undertaken to improve trade liberalization with Europe, they improved conditions for streamlined trade among themselves. There is significant potential for trade in services in the financial sector, transportation and logistics, and communications and information, among other sectors. According to some studies, comprehensive services reforms that involve increased competition and regulatory streamlining would yield benefits that are at least twice the magnitude of those achieved through tariff removal alone.

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the extent to which trade agreements affect agricultural trade policy volatility. Using a new panel database compiled as part of the World Bank's agricultural distortions research project, the author estimate the effect of regionalism on the volatility of price distortions measured by the absolute value of their first differences, averaged, for each country and year, over all agricultural goods. Using an instrumental-variable approach to correct for the endogeneity of regional trade agreements, (RTAs), the author fined that participation in RTAs has a significantly negative effect on agricultural trade-policy volatility. The author find that the World Trade Organization (WTO) agricultural agreement also contributed to reducing agricultural trade-policy volatility, in spite of the weak disciplines involved, but the effect is only weakly identified. The results are robust to a variety of robustness checks and hold, in particular, for the Latin American sub-sample.

This article analyzes the relationship between trade facilitation and trade flows in the Asia Pacific region. Country specific data for port efficiency, customs environment, regulatory environment, and e-business usage are used to construct indicators for measuring trade facilitation. The relationship between these indicators and trade flows is estimated using a gravity model that includes tariffs and other standard variables. Enhanced port efficiency has a large and positive effect on trade flows. Regulatory barriers deter trade. Improvements in customs and greater e-business use significantly expand trade but to a lesser degree than improvements in ports or regulations. The benefits of specific trade facilitation efforts are estimated by quantifying differential improvements in these four areas among members of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). A scenario in which APEC members with below-average indicators improve capacity halfway to the average forall members shows that intra-APEC trade could increase by Dollar 254 billion, or 21 percent of intra-APEC trade flows.