This paper studies the value of external commitment to policy reforms in the case of WTO/GATT accessions. The accessions often entail reforms that go beyond narrowly defined trade liberalization, and have to overcome fierce resistance in the acceding countries, as reflected in protracted...

According to the Washington Consensus, developing countries? growth would benefit from a reduction in tariffs and other barriers to trade. But a backlash against this view now suggests that trade policies have little or no impact on growth. If quot;getting policies rightquot; is wrong or...

Several studies suggest that production of high-quality output is a precondition for firms in less developed countries to participate in the export market. Institutional deficiencies that raise the costs of entry into high-quality production therefore limit the positive impact that trade...

While new conventional wisdom warns that developing countries should be aware of the risks of premature capital account liberalization, the costs of not removing exchange controls have received much less attention. This paper investigates the negative effects of exchange controls on trade. To...

This paper argues that the pursuit of special and differential treatments (SDT) by developing countries has hampered the liberalization of global service trade, which is one of the causes of the only slowing improving of service efficiency globally. We use value added per worker as a proxy of...

This paper asks why developing country policymakers have been so reluctant to undertake trade reform until the 1980s, and why many of them have embraced open trade policies so wholeheartedly since then. To answer these questions, the paper develops a heuristic index of the "political...

This paper both documents the involvement of developing countries in coalitional activity in the current GATT Uruguay round thus far, and provides a rudimenting evaluation of the pros and cons of the different options for them as far as coalitional strategies are concerned. The main conclusions...

This paper deals with the role of trade regimes in determining economic performance and growth in the developing countries. The policy and empirical literatures on trade orientation and economic growth are critically reviewed; it is argued that a key limitation of these works has been the...

We review the empirical evidence on the relationship between Trade Liberalization, Inequality, and Poverty based on the analysis of micro data from several developing countries that underwent significant trade reforms in recent years. Despite many measurement and identification difficulties, and...