We use several different data sets to investigate the dependence of transport costs on geography and infrastructure. Poor infrastructure accounts for 40% of predicted transport costs for coastal countries and 60% for landlocked. Landlocked countries can substantially reduce their high transport costs through improvements in own and transit countries' infrastructure. Analysis of bilateral trade ...

This paper considers the nature and the distribution of trade and FDI effects of a potential enlargement of the European Monetary Union (EMU) to the ten countries that obtained EU membership in 2004. Intuitively, the implementation of a single currency for these countries means replacing several fluctuating currencies by a common currency. This gives rise to both “level” and “risk” effects of r...

The growth of regional trade blocks has been one of the major developments in international relations in recent years. Regional agreements vary widely but, all have the objective of reducing barriers to trade between member countries that in most cases result in increasingly trade flows and economic growth. This paper attempts to explore the results of trade integration in ECO, EU and OIC block...

This study, encompassing 231 countries and regions, quantifies the global transfer of three critical metals (neodymium, cobalt, and platinum) considered vital for low-carbon technologies by means of material flow analysis (MFA), using trade data (BACI) and the metal contents of trade commodities, resolving the optimization problem to ensure the material balance of the metals within each country...

What’s the Buzz? In the summer of 2002, I started to circulate research that argued it is not clear that the World Trade Organization (“WTO”) or its pre-1995 predecessor the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (“GATT”) have actually increased trade. My argument was empirical and used two sorts of evidence. First, in my 2004 paper, I used bilateral and multilateral data sets to show that trad...