Business & Trade

Imported digital goods are critical for productivity growth in low-income countries. Using detailed data on international trade flows and tariffs, this paper finds that African nations tend to import relatively low quality, low price digital goods. Unilateral tariff liberalization toward all…

This paper studies the stages of countries’ economic diversification across three dimensions, namely employment, value-added, and exports. Patterns of diversification are mainly driven by between-country rather than within-country variation, a finding that had been ignored in the existing…

Reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 requires unprecedented scaling up in the global deployment of critical decarbonization technologies. This paper lays out an evidence-based strategy to help diversify the global value chains of decarbonization technologies across countries with latent production…

This paper analyzes the effects of carbon taxation and border carbon adjustments in a setting where firms can choose to respond to taxation by abating or by outsourcing part of their production. The paper finds that border adjustments that cannot target scope 3 emissions can lead to outsourcing,…

Despite the efforts made to increase women’s inclusion in the economy, they are still underrepresented in trade in general and in global value chains in particular. Thus, this paper aims at examining the impact of global value chains on women’s trade participation as entrepreneurs and employees.…

Trade and labor markets are intimately connected. This connection presents governments with a dual economic challenge that cannot be resolved without social compromise: maximizing aggregate gains but minimizing disaggregated costs, which can include losses to individuals and groups. This paper…