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Despite strong economic growth since 2000, Moldova remains one of the poorest countries in the region. Excessive reliance on remittances, export dependency on a few products, and insufficient domestic job creation make the Moldovan economy highly vulnerable to external conditions. As a small and open economy, Moldova’s development potential is linked to its trade and investment integration strategy. Moldova is situated between two large markets: the European Union (EU), which absorbs more than half of Moldova’s exports, and the Russian Federation. Reducing the economic distance to large regional markets and reaping the benefits of openness is key to overcoming Moldova's structural constraints and spurring export-led growth. The objective of the Moldova Trade Study is to contribute to a better understanding of the factors and challenges underlying Moldova’s foreign trade performance and to identify policy interventions that can enhance the competitiveness of Moldova’s exporting firms and the value added of their exports. . The rest of the note is structured as follows: (ii) section two summarizes the analysis of Moldova’s export performance; (iii) section three focuses on constraints on Moldova’s competitiveness; (iv) in section four, the authors consider alternative trade policy scenarios and their implications for the Moldovan economy; (v) section five synthetizes existing analysis on constraints for agriculture competitiveness and exports, while section six evaluates the performance of free economic zones in Moldova. In the final section, the authors present policy recommendations

Once concentrated among a few large economies, global flows of goods, services, and capital now reach an ever larger number of economies worldwide. Global trade in goods and services increased 10 times between 1980 and 2011, while FDI flows increased almost 30-fold. The sales from foreign-owned firms amount to $26 trillion. As many as 3,000 bilateral investment treaties have been signed to create the framework of deep agreements needed not only to facilitate the global movement of final goods and services but also to internationalize entire processes of production. All these flows have grown over time, creating increasingly dense and complex networks. This note is intended provide an overview of SACU countries’ participation and performance in GVCs, drawing on several data sources and indicators, and most importantly the recently released 189-country Eora multi-region-input-output (MRIO) database (Lenzen et al. 2012, 2013). Following this introduction, the note is structured in five additional sections. Section two discusses in greater detail the scope of the report, including the data sources and methodological approaches, as well as their respective limitations. Section three looks at structural integration in trade, including the degree to which SACU countries import and export intermediates. Section four analyzes trends in value-added exports as a first step in exploring GVC participation. Section five hones in on the core measures of GVC participation and a brief analysis of SACU countries’ position in GVCs. Finally, section six concludes by bringing together the main findings from the analysis.

This paper analyzes the impacts of selected trade facilitation measures on international trade flows. A gravity model is used to estimate four equations: a pooled cross-section model; a fixed-effects model; a random effects model; and a Poisson maximum likelihood estimator. The contribution of the paper is twofold. First, the analysis uses a recent data set, a panel that includes trade data from 2011 and 2012 for 72 countries. Second, to measure the impacts of trade facilitation measures, the analysis includes dummy variables for the presence of an authorized economic operator program, the existence of a single-window program in the countries in the sample, and the existence of a mutual recognition arrangement between pairs of countries in the sample. The results show that the presence of an authorized economic operator program and the existence of a single-window program will improve countries’ trade performance. By contrast, the existence of a mutual recognition arrangement will not necessarily improve countries’ trade performance. These results suggest that, in general, trade facilitation measures as a whole will help countries improve their trade performance.

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.

In order to investigate the effects of trade on asymmetric countries, we build a simple two-country Melitz model with cross-country efficiency differences and market size variations. We also introduce a public good financed by tax revenues. We find that free trade makes the more efficient country produce more and alleviate the fiscal burden on its economy. The effects are completely opposite for the other country. Furthermore, we show that when the relative size of the technologically advanced country is large enough, we assist to an agglomeration of resources in this country. The main contribution of this paper is to prove that the more asymmetric the countries are, the more heterogeneous is the impact of trade on their respective GDP, aggregate profits and tax rate.

Preferential trade arrangements should be evaluated by their effect on prices rather than by their effect on the total value of trade. This point is emphasized in the theoretical literature but rarely implemented empirically. This article analyzes the U.S. Caribbean Basin Initiative's (CBI's) impact on the prices received by eligible apparel exporters. The CBI's apparel preferences are the most important and heavily used unilateral preferences because of high trade barriers imposed on exports from the rest of the world. A fixed effect generalized least squares (GLS) estimation is used to isolate the effects of other factors (such as quality, exchange rates, and transaction costs) and to identify the effects of tariff preferences. CBI exporters capture only about two-thirds of their preference margin despite the high degree of competition among importers. This translates into a 9 percent increase in the relative prices they receive, with some variance across countries and years. Countries specializing in higher value items capture more of the preference margin, and the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has a negative effect. Removing multifibre arrangement quotas significantly lowers the benefits of CBI preferences.

Industry affiliation provides an important channel through which trade liberalization can affect worker earnings and wage inequality between skilled and unskilled workers. This empirical study of the impact of the 1988-94 trade liberalization in Brazil on the industry wage structure suggests that although industry affiliation is an important component of worker earnings, the structure of industry wage premiums is relatively stable over time. There is no statistical association between changes in industry wage premiums and changes in trade policy or between industry-specific skill premiums to university graduates and trade policy. Thus trade liberalization in Brazil did not significantly contribute to increased wage inequality between skilled and unskilled workers through changes in industry wage premiums. The difference between these results and those obtained for other countries (such as Colombia and Mexico) provides fruitful ground for studying the conditions under which trade reforms do not have an adverse effect on industry wage differentials

There is a large body of research that explores international trade as a source of the dispersion in income levels and growth performances across countries. The trade liberalization policies undertaken between 1950 and 2006 led to an almost 30 fold growth in the volume of international trade. However this increase has not been homogeneous across countries. This study investigates a possible reason that prevents convergence of countries in export performance. It shows that regulatory quality, customs efficiency, quality of infrastructure, and access to finance among other factors increase export performance. Furthermore, it shows that countries that are relatively more constrained in accessing to foreign markets benefit more from improvements in investment climate than the countries with easier foreign market access. Hence attaining a favorable investment climate for private sector development should be an important policy objective for relatively closed economies to achieve convergence in export volumes with countries that have more liberal trade policies.

This paper analyzes the economic effects of agricultural price and merchandise trade policies around the world as of 2004 on global markets, net farm incomes, and national and regional economic welfare and poverty, using the global economy wide Linkage model, new estimates of agricultural price distortions for developing countries, and poverty elasticity's approach. It addresses two questions: to what extent are policies as of 2004 still reducing rewards from farming in developing countries and thereby adding to inequality across countries in farm household incomes? Are they depressing value added more in primary agriculture than in the rest of the economy of developing countries, and earnings of unskilled workers more than of owners of other factors of production, thereby potentially contributing to inequality and poverty within developing countries (given that farm incomes are well below non-farm incomes in most developing countries and that agriculture there is intensive in the use of unskilled labor)? Results are presented for the key countries and regions of the world and for the world as a whole. They reveal that, by moving to free markets, income inequality between countries will be reduced at least slightly, all but one-sixth of the gains to developing countries will come from agricultural policy reform, unskilled workers in developing countries the majority of whom work on farms will benefit most from reform, net farm incomes in developing countries will rise by 6 percent compared with 2 percent for non-agricultural value added, and the number of people surviving on less than US$1 a day will drop 3 percent globally.

The Doha round of multilateral trade negotiations stalled in 2008 owing in no small degree to a lack of agreement on the terms of substantially reducing trade-distorting support for agricultural products and to what extent this will be beneficial to developing countries. Nicaragua presents an interesting case in point, being one of the poorest economies in Latin America with still a relatively large agricultural sector and high degrees of rural poverty. In 2005, the country signed a free trade agreement with the United States. This chapter provides a quantitative analysis addressing that question. It does so using a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model for Nicaragua coupled with a micro-simulation methodology. The first section provides background information on trade reform policies and macroeconomic trends in Nicaragua, with special reference to the agricultural sector and rural poverty. The section that follows describes the main features of the CGE model and the micro-simulation methodology used to assess the impact on poverty and inequality. The author then lay out the model scenarios considered, which include liberalizations of agricultural and all merchandise goods trade by the rest of the world and by Nicaragua itself. That is followed by a summary analysis of results. This analysis includes tests for the sensitivity of the results with respect to assumptions regarding the responsiveness of trade to price liberalization, as identified through the relevant trade elasticities. The final section provides conclusions and possible policy implications.

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.

Most researchers examining poverty and multilateral trade liberalization have had to examine average, or per capita effects, suggesting that if per capita real income rises, poverty will fall. This inference can be misleading. Combining results from a new international cross-section consumption analysis with earnings data from household surveys, this article analyzes the implications of multilateral trade liberalization for poverty in Indonesia. It finds that the aggregate reduction in Indonesia's national poverty headcount following global trade liberalization masks a more complex set of impacts across groups. In the short run the poverty headcount rises slightly for self-employed agricultural households, as agricultural profits fail to keep up with increases in consumer prices. In the long run the poverty headcount falls for all earnings strata, as increased demand for unskilled workers lifts incomes for the formerly self-employed, some of whom move into the wage labor market. A decomposition of the poverty changes in Indonesia associated with different countries' trade policies finds that reform in other countries leads to a reduction in poverty in Indonesia but that liberalization of Indonesia's trade policies leads to an increase. The method used here can be readily extended to any of the other 13 countries in the sample.