Paul Brenton

This report provides analysis and tools to guide policymakers in developing countries on key issues related to trade. Part 1 analyzes climate change and evolving comparative advantages of developing country trade. Part 2 takes an in-depth look into the design of climate-related trade policy instruments that support developing country trade.

The COVID-19 pandemic provides a unique event demonstrating the risks associated with global value chains as well as ways in which they are a source of resilience in trade. Efforts to reshore production would make all countries worse off and increase the number of people in extreme poverty.

While trade can exacerbate climate change, it will also be a central part of the solution by enhancing both mitigation and adaptation. This report explores the intersection between trade and climate change and the policies that offer the right economic incentives for attaining sustainable growth and poverty reduction through trade.

International Trade, Distribution and Development brings together a collection of papers that have sought to assess empirically the impacts of policy measures affecting trade. The carefully selected papers analyze the impact of trade barriers and their removal, with a focus on distributional consequences and economic development. Grounded in rigorous empirical analysis, this book covers a range of policy issues such as impacts of trade on wages, non-tariff barriers, trade preferences, export survival and carbon labelling. An invaluable reference for readers seeking to understand the impact of trade policies, the book also seeks to shed light on future research, especially for research on developing countries.

African exporters suffer from low survival rates on international markets. They fail more often than others, incurring time and again the setup costs involved in starting new relationships. This high churning is a source of waste, uncertainty, and discouragement. However, this trend is not inevitable. The high “infant mortality” of African exports is largely explained by Africa’s low-income business environment and, once properly benchmarked, Africa’s performance in terms of exporter failure is no outlier. Moreover, African exporters show vigorous entrepreneurship, with high entry rates into new products and markets despite formidable hurdles created by poor infrastructure, landlocked boundaries for some, and limited access to major sea routes for others. African exporters experiment a lot, and they frequently pay the price of failure. What matters for policy is how to ensure that viable ventures survive. Research carried out for this book demonstrates that governments can and should help to reduce the rate of failure of African export ventures through a mixture of improvements in the business environment, as well as well-targeted proactive interventions. The business environment can be made more conducive to sustainable export entrepreneurship through traditional policy prescriptions such as reducing transportation costs, facilitating trade through better technology and workflow in border management, improving the effectiveness of banking regulations to ensure the availability of trade finance, and striving for regulatory simplicity and coherence. In addition, governments can help leverage synergies between exporters. Original research featured in this book shows that African exporters improve each other's chances of survival when a critical mass of them penetrates a given market together. They also benefit from diaspora presence in destination markets. With adequate donor support and private-sector engagement, export-promotion agencies and technical-assistance programs can help leverage those synergies.|African exporters suffer from low survival rates on international markets. They fail more often than others, incurring time and again the setup costs involved in starting new relationships. This high churning is a source of waste, uncertainty, and discouragement. However, this volume shows that this is not inevitable. The high “infant mortality” of African exports is largely explained by the difficulty of Africa’s low-income business environment—once properly benchmarked, Africa’s performance in terms of exporter failure is no outlier. Moreover, as in other low-income countries, African exporters show vigorous entrepreneurship, with high entry rates into new products and markets in spite of the formidable hurdles created by poor infrastructure, landlockedness for some, and limited access to major sea routes for others. African exporters experiment a lot, and frequent failure is a price to pay for experimentation. What matters for policy is to ensure that viable ventures survive. Research carried out for this volume demonstrates that governments can and should help to reduce the ""high infant mortality"" of African export ventures through a mixture of improvements in the business environment and well-targeted proactive interventions. The business environment can be made more conducive to sustainable export entrepreneurship through traditional policy prescriptions such as reducing transportation costs, facilitating trade through better technology and workflow in border management, improving the effectiveness of banking regulations to ensure the availability of trade finance, and striving for regulatory simplicity and coherence. In addition, governments can help exporters leverage synergies between exporters. Original research carried out for this volume shows that African exporters improve each other’s chances of survival when a critical mass of them penetrate a given market together. They also benefit from the presence of national diasporas in the destination markets. With adequate donor support and private-sector engagement, export-promotion agencies and technical-assistance programs can help leverage those synergies.| Nothing affects the modern economy (and society) more than decisions made in the market place, especially, but not only, decisions made by consumers. Although it is not startling to suggest that decisions made in production are affected by choices consumers make, consumers have long been viewed, not only by academic economists, as individual, isolated rational actors that make or refrain from purchases purely on the basis of narrow financial considerations. Markets are not and never were morally neutral. Market relations have always had an often taken-for-granted moral underpinning. The moralization of the markets refers to the dissolution and replacement of the conventional moral underpinnings of market conduct, for example, in the music market, financial markets, and corporate governance. It further implies not only the heightened importance of new ethical precepts, but the significant change in the role of moral ideals in market behavior. These profound transformations of economic conduct are accompanied and co-determined by societal conflicts. The moralization of markets represents thus a new stage in the social evolution of markets. The book is divided into four parts, in which the twelve chapters, written by contributors from different social science disciplines, deal with the context of the moralization of the markets; the major social institutions; and present case studies that examine European and American attitudes and behavior towards tobacco and GMO; expansion of the private and ethics in business; and how workers respond to the new corporate norms. This volume will be of interest to sociologists, economists, social scientists, and the general consumer alike.