Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.

• Growth Trends in the Developing World : Country Forecasts and Determinants

  Ianchovichina, Elena; Kacker, Pooja (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-06-20)

  The authors present real per capita GDP growth forecasts for all developing countries for the period 2005-14. For 55 of these countries, representing major world regions and accounting for close to 80 percent of the developing world's GDP, they forecast the growth effects of the main forces underpinning growth, assuming that these evolve following past trends. The authors find that for the average developing country the largest growth dividend comes from continued improvement in public infrastructure, followed by the growth contributions of rising secondary school enrollment, trade openness, and financial deepening. The joint contribution of these four growth determinants to average, annual per capita GDP growth in the next decade is estimated to be 1 percentage point. Failure to keep improving public infrastructure alone could reduce this growth dividend by 50 percent. The forecasted growth contributions differ by country qualitatively and quantitatively.
• Does Migration Foster Exports? Evidence from Africa

  Ehrhart, Hélène; Singh, Raju Jan; Rocher, Emmanuel; Le Goff, Maëlan (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-02-03)

  This paper aims at assessing the impact of migration on export performance and more particularly the effect of African migrants on African trade. Relying on a new data set on international bilateral migration recently released by the World Bank spanning from 1980 to 2010, the authors estimate a gravity model that deals satisfactorily with endogeneity. The results first indicate that the pro-trade effect of migration is higher for African countries, a finding that can be partly explained by the substitution between migrants and institutions (the existence of migrant networks compensating for weak contract enforcement, for instance). This positive association is particularly important for the exports of differentiated products, suggesting that migrants also play an important role in reducing information costs. Moreover, focusing on intra-African trade, the pro-trade effect of African migrants is larger when migrants are established in a more geographically and ethnically distant country. All these findings highlight the ability of African migrants to help overcome some of the main barriers to African trade: the weakness of institutions, information costs, cultural differences, and lack of trust.
• Developing Countries, Dispute Settlement, and the Advisory Centre on WTO Law

  Bown, Chad P.; McCulloch, Rachel (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-09-02)

  Critical appraisals of the current and
 potential benefits from developing country engagement in the
 World Trade Organization (WTO) focus mainly on the Doha
 Round of negotiations. This paper examines developing
 country participation in the WTO dispute settlement system
 to enforce foreign market access rights already negotiated
 in earlier multilateral rounds. The dispute data from 1995
 through 2008 reveal three notable trends: developing
 countries sustained rate of self-enforcement actions
 despite declining use of the Dispute Settlement
 Understanding (DSU) by developed countries, developing
 countries increased use of the DSU to self-enforce their
 access to the markets of developing as well as developed
 country markets, and the prevalence of disputes targeting
 highly observable causes of lost foreign market access, such
 as antidumping, countervailing duties, and safeguards. The
 paper also examines potential impacts of the Advisory Centre
 on WTO Law (ACWL) into the WTO system in 2001. A close look
 at the data reveals evidence on at least three channels
 through which the ACWL may be enhancing developing
 countries' ability to self-enforce foreign market
 access: increased initiation of sole-complainant cases, more
 extensive pursuit of the DSU legal process for any given
 case, and initiation of disputes over smaller values of lost trade.