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The high level of exports and their product and market concentration exposes the Democratic Republic of Congo to the economic fluctuations of the country's trade partners. This paper uses the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development trade data set to analyze the Democratic Republic of Congo's export patterns for the period 1960-2014. The data confirm that the country's exports remain highly concentrated. The product concentration on minerals is high and reaches exceptional levels. The geographic concentration is also high, while there is a shift in destinations. Hence, EU27, traditionally the main market destination for the Democratic Republic of Congo, lost its importance to China for most of the past decade. This trend continued to increase in the past few years from 2010 to 2013. The clear prevalence of commodity products within the Democratic Republic of Congo's exports and the higher exposure to the Chinese economic cycle are sources of vulnerability. The empirical analysis indicates that the country's exports appear to be significantly sensitive to foreign demand fluctuations. This exposure increases the volatility of the country's macroeconomic framework to exogenous shocks, with negative consequences on growth in gross domestic product and on external balances. The analysis concludes that increasing the Democratic Republic of Congo's resilience requires product and market diversification of exports. This diversification requires improvements in the investment climate and business environment, with emphasis on skills and infrastructure.

After sharply declining in the first half of 2015, world trade began to grow, albeit at a slow pace. Preliminary data indicate that merchandise import growth was 1.7 percent in 2015, down from 3 percent in 2014. Recent trade developments should be seen in the context of a deceleration in trade growth since the early 2000s, and particularly since the global financial crisis. These developments reflected a combination of old and new cyclical factors as well as enduring structural determinants, such as the maturation of global value chains and the slower pace of trade liberalization. In particular, trade developments in Latin America and Eastern Europe and Central Asia mostly reflected lower imports of recession hit commodity exporters such as Brazil and Russia. Latin America contributed 6 percent to the downward pull in global imports in 2015. Except for Japan, imports and exports of advanced economies did not show signs of a significant downturn, but were sluggish. Lower commodity prices have reduced real incomes in commodity producers and led to a contraction in their imports from all regions, including China. At the same time, the gradual shift from investment to consumption in China, and the more significant contraction in its industrial production seen in early 2015, have reduced its imports from other regions, including commodity producers.

In the last decade Morocco undertook substantial, if gradual, trade liberalization by reducing tariffs, reforming trade regulations and signing free and preferential trade agreements with several regions and countries, including the United States, Turkey, the European Union and Arab countries. This paper analyzes the impact of input tariff reduction on Moroccan exporting firms through the channel of intermediate goods. Gaining access to more varied and cheaper inputs can make exporting firms more competitive, and as a result they export more. To evaluate how this policy may impact firms export performance, the paper analyzes the impact of input tariff reduction on different margins of trade with emphasis on export markets and product diversification. The identification of the effect of input tariffs on exports relies on a difference-in-difference estimator using heterogeneous access to import tariff exemption as a measure of different levels of exposure to input tariff reduction at the firm level. Overall, the analysis finds that firms that are relatively more exposed to input tariff perform better in those sectors with the largest input tariff reduction, with better access to markets, higher probability to survive when exporting new products in those sectors and higher export value growth.

There is increasing evidence suggesting that climate change will negatively impact agricultural production in South Asia. Decreased domestic production may make South Asian countries more dependent on imports. The extent to which South Asia will need to increase its imports as a result of climate change will presumably depend on the degree to which the latter will affect domestic output. The effects of climate change on agriculture may well differ substantially for individual South Asian countries and indeed for regions within a given country which can be approximated by food production units. This calls for an analysis of climate change effects on trade flows under alternative trade policy regimes both for agriculture and non-agricultural sectors. The specific objectives of the paper include the following: analyze the extent to which agricultural production in South Asia and elsewhere in the world may be affected by different scenarios regarding climate change; analyze the extent to which changes in domestic production in South Asia resulting from climate change will lead to increased demand for imports by South Asian countries; analyze the effects of increased import demand in South Asia and changing exportable surpluses elsewhere on world market prices of major agricultural commodities consumed in South Asia; to the extent that South Asian governments allow transmission of changes in world market prices to domestic prices, analyze the potential welfare effects of changes in the latter; analyze if, and to what extent, worldwide trade liberalization and implementation of South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA) will dampen the effects of climate change on domestic agricultural prices in South Asia. In this context, the report is organized as follows: chapter one gives introduction. Chapter two describes the methodology used - with particular attention to how different models and modeling techniques are linked to produce an as accurate as possible assessment based on state-of-the-art knowledge. Chapter three provides an up-to-date analysis of trade flows and policies, and production patterns for key food products in South Asia to explain the context in which climate change is taking place. Chapter four describes the climate change scenarios and illustrates their consequences for crop yields at a global level and for South Asia - and in particular shows the vulnerability of the region to these changes. Baseline design, simulations, and results are discussed in chapter five. The final chapter six provides a short summary, discusses the limitations of the analysis, and derives suggestions and guidelines for future research.

The bachelor thesis titled The Stock Exchange Market in the Czech Republic and Selected EU Member States deals with the establishment and development of the capital market in the Czech Republic, Hungary and the United Kingdom. The main objective of the thesis is to evaluate the development of stock exchange indicators in 2006 and a few more years in the past. The theoretical part, explaining the basic concepts, is followed by the presentation of the main stock exchange index for the stock market and bond market respectively, on each of the stock exchanges separately. Subsequently, all the indexes were mutually compared. Efficiency, liquidity and the risk level were examined on all the individual markets separately. The comparison of all the indicators and outcomes resulted in a clear conclusion that the London Stock Exchange is the most developed among the currently compared ones, belonging to the group of the world{\crq}s major stock exchanges. Both stock exchanges from the Central European region should, in theoretical terms, have similar results. However, the reality is different. As regards the volumes of trades, in this case, a larger volume in 2006 was traded on the Prague Stock Exchange. However, if we look at the results of the other indicators, the Budapest Stock Exchange achieved better figures in almost all the other cases.