Impact evaluation in trade: Time for a cultural revolution?

Olivier Cadot, Jaime de Melo, 14 April 2013Programmes that help developing nations trade are a key part of the global trade and development agenda. But do such policies work? This column summarises lessons from a recent workshop on the issue. One promising way forward is to use benchmarking from existing data sets to identify the aid’s effectiveness.Full Article: Aid for trade: Can it be evaluated?

Simon J Evenett, Robert M. Stern, 21 March 2013The US and the EU have announced their intentions to launch trade talks – the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. This column argues that this should not be thought of as a standard tariff-lowering deal with a few extras thrown in for good measure. Rather, we don’t really know what it will do because trade economists have failed to develop the necessary tools for understanding its impact.

J. Bradford Jensen, 19 November 2012Should developed countries fear trade in services? Won’t high skilled jobs be lost to cheaper, developing country service workers? This column argues that trade in services represents a profitable opportunity as long as international trade in services is liberalised.

Anders Olofsgård, 13 October 2012The recent focus on impact evaluation within development economics has led to increased pressure on aid agencies to provide evidence from randomised controlled trials. This column argues this reinforces a political bias towards immediately verifiable and media-packaged results at the expense of more long-term and complex processes such as institutional development.Full Article: A deadly mix for aid effectiveness

Conventional wisdom holds that bribery is the preferred means of influencing government policy in less developed countries, while lobbying is more common in developed countries. Perhaps due to this perceived compartmentalization of lobbying and bribery, very little is known about the relationship between lobbying and bribery, the extent and effectiveness of lobbying vs. bribery in less developed countries, and how this relationship changes as countries move up the development ladder.