This paper examines how procurement rules affect international trade, leveraging a novel dataset that characterizes national laws across 142 countries. Analysis of national laws on government procurement identifies prevalent protectionist measures such as preferential treatment for domestic bidders and mandatory domestic sourcing. A descriptive analysis reveals that 124 countries incorporate preferential treatment provisions, highlighting the widespread nature of protectionism. The prevalence of procurement policies, characterized as protectionist, negatively correlates with trade openness across countries, in both public and private markets. This protectionist effect is confirmed in gravity regressions. Countries with more protectionist procurement laws are found to buy more from domestic suppliers than from abroad. Industry-level estimates suggest that such effects are stronger for goods than for services.

In 2021, Russia and Belarus supplied 41% of EU imports, but following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine and subsequent sanctions, trade with both countries collapsed. EU import demand is estimated by exporting country, and a choke‑price approach is used to recover the trade costs implied by sanctions. The results indicate high implied tariffs on Belarus (43.0%) and Russia (49.4%), while the United States and the rest of the world experienced large implied “subsidies” 70.0%, and 166.2%, respectively. Despite large and statistically significant cross‑price elasticities suggesting substitution toward Ukraine, trade gains accrued primarily to the United States and ROW.

Theory supports two opposing trajectories regarding the effects of trade provisions on micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) and on their integration into the global value chain (GVC). On the one hand, provisions such as increased competitiveness, networking support, and cooperation provisions enhance firms’ GVC participation. On the other hand, provisions that establish common standards and regulations that increase compliance costs can be burdensome for small enterprises. This paper examines the effect of such MSME-related provisions on participation in GVCs. By merging the World Trade Organization trade agreements and the World Bank Enterprise Surveys datasets, we contribute to the literature in two ways. First, we distinguish between trade-related and non-trade-related provisions. Second, we scrutinize the heterogeneity across sectors, income levels, and regions. Our results show a particularly positive effect of MSME-related provisions, with a larger effect of non-trade-related provisions compared with trade-related ones. In addition, this effect is particularly relevant to low-technology-intensive sectors, low-income countries, and Asian economies. Our results remain consistent when using alternative variables, sample characteristics, and estimation methods.

This paper examines how disparities in market-based and non-market-based environmental policy instruments affect gross exports and domestic value added in exports, distinguishing between intermediate and final goods and services at the industry level. We estimate a theory-based gravity model with country-industry-time fixed effects using Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood for 32 countries, 56 industries and the period 2000–2014. The results show that the widening gap in market-based instruments between countries is associated with competitiveness losses for high-polluting industries – especially producers of intermediate goods – while low-polluting industries experience short-run gains in comparative advantage, with effects concentrated in the manufacturing sector and driven largely by OECD–non-OECD trade. By contrast, the effects of non-market-based regulatory gaps depend on the time period and the institutional quality of the destination country and are associated, in some cases, with export growth in low-polluting industries and with industrial technology upgrading.

This paper introduces the Granular Trade and Production Activities (GRANTPA) database, which covers international trade flows for 3,124 products and 247 countries over the period 1995–2019 as well as domestic trade flows and production data for the same number of products and years for a subset of 35 European economies. The original data sources that we employ are Eurostat’s Comext and Prodcom databases. A gravity application delivers a large set of product-level ‘home bias’ estimates, which cannot be obtained without domestic trade flows. The average estimates on the standard gravity variables in our model (e.g., distance) are comparable to those from the related literature. However, our disaggregated estimates are very heterogeneous across products, thus highlighting the importance of our new database.

This paper offers a reassessment of the expansion of Spanish banks in Latin America between 1990 and 2020. We build upon the seminal work of Pablo Martín-Aceña and draw on the intangible assets framework developed by Guillén (2005) and Guillén & García Canal (2010). Incorporating new primary sources, particularly first-hand testimonies from key participants, we argue that it was not financial strength or technological invention that necessitated expansion, but decisive organizational capabilities proved instrumental. This perspective sheds new light on the motivations behind the expansion, the processes of consolidation, and the relative success of Spanish banks in the region. Our analysis reveals how strategic entry methods, innovative managerial practices, and targeted technological developments enabled these institutions to gain a competitive edge over both domestic banks and long-established international competitors. A key theoretical contribution lies in our distinction between technological adoption and transformative deployment.

We analyzed the determinants and potential of U.S. agricultural exports to South Asian, Southeast Asian, and Southern African countries by employing a stochastic frontier gravity model. Our estimated results suggest that importers’ GDP, institutional quality, globalization level, and participation in Trade and Investment Framework Agreement significantly promote U.S. exports, while geographic distance and landlocked status act as major constraints. The derived technical efficiency scores reveal considerable underperformance of U.S. exports. We recommend that the United States can expand and strengthen its Trade and Investment Framework Agreement, institutional cooperation, interconnectedness, and direct policy focus toward countries with the largest export gaps.

This paper presents a new series of Mexico’s foreign trade for the period 1821–1870, using foreign sources to reconstruct it, given the scarcity of Mexican-origin data. It then employs the new series with a twofold purpose: to indicate the type of economy and society that they reveal, showing the kind of articles that the country acquired and sent to the exterior, on the one hand, and building some of the measures used in the international literature to assess the performance of the external sector, on the other. In the end, the paper evaluates the functioning of the Mexican economy that those series expose.

Using Wine Spectator’s Top 100 lists for 1988–2025, this note applies Bai–Perron structural break tests to regional and country shares and identifies three distinct periods: 1988–1997, 1998–2015, and 2016–2025. Real prices decline across phases, with the sharpest drop in the most recent period, while scores remain stable and concentration falls sharply between the first two periods and then levels off. Turnover also declines in the most recent period, indicating reduced year-to-year movement in regional representation. Robust regressions confirm that prices are lower in periods with lower concentration. The findings extend earlier JWE studies by providing a longer horizon and a structural break perspective on long-run changes in representation and pricing.

This paper examines the impact of shared religious composition on global wine trade. We assembled a novel dataset of bilateral wine trade flows and country-level religious affiliation for 102 countries from 1988 to 2023. Our theory-consistent gravity estimates show that a greater common share of Protestant denominations between trading partners is associated with increased bilateral wine trade. In contrast, a higher share of Other Christian denominations is associated with lower trade intensity. To quantify the implications of religious similarity for global wine trade, we conducted a general equilibrium simulation. We find that increasing global alignment in the Protestant denomination would reduce trade costs more than eliminating all global tariffs, with major exporters seeing export gains up to 205.9%. These findings suggest that cultural factors, long treated as secondary, play a central role in shaping trade integration and should be considered alongside standard trade policy tools.

This paper analyzes the impact of product-market fit on firms’ export performance, focusing specifically on the case of wineries. To this end, we use a representative sample of Spanish wineries and data on 49 export markets. The empirical analysis is based on a firm heterogeneity model that integrates both macroeconomic and firm-level factors influencing wine export performance. Our findings indicate that a good product–market match facilitates export activity and can mitigate traditional barriers to international trade, such as geographic or political distance. When a winery conducts effective market research and identify markets where consumer preferences align closely with the characteristics of its products, its export performance improves significantly.

The production, trade, and consumption of meat products and their movement around the planet were essential to the development of global markets during the first wave of globalization. This article analyzes the main changes in the ownership structure and profile of the beef industry in South America from the late nineteenth century until 1930 and how this process was reflected in certain macroeconomic variables. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the drivers of success of the meat-producing regions of Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, and Patagonia (both the Argentine and Chilean sides), and also examined the failure cases of Venezuela and the Colombian Caribbean.

The stock-to-use ratio (STU) is a widely utilized indicator to assess market conditions and forecast price movements for agricultural commodities. However, before drawing any conclusions, it is essential to empirically investigate the relationship between STU and commodity prices. Using rice as a case study, this research examines the empirical linkage between rice prices and STU, both collectively and individually across 16 leading rice-producing and consuming countries. To do so, the study first employs the panel vector autoregression approach to capture the dynamic interrelationships in a panel data setting, followed by vector autoregression estimation at the individual country level. The results suggest an inverse relationship between rice prices and STU: higher rice prices are associated with lower STU levels (i.e., higher scarcity), and vice versa. Furthermore, the Toda-Yamamoto Granger causality tests indicate that monitoring the STU levels of a select group of influential countries can yield significant insights into global rice export price dynamics. In addition, the analysis highlights the pivotal role of urea fertilizer in maintaining the stability of global rice prices. These findings are particularly relevant in the context of strong government intervention in managing rice stocks in several key rice markets.

China was one of the world's most important areas of growth in wine demand in the 2010s, accounting for 7% of the world's wine consumption and 8% of its value of wine imports by 2017. But China's per capita wine consumption peaked in the mid-2010s, and its wine imports have more than halved since then. As well, the sources of China's imports of wine have fluctuated considerably over the past two decades, making this a risky market for wine exporters. Certainly, the COVID-19 disruption played a role, but between 2019 and 2022, the fall in sales was considerably larger for wine (47%) than for spirits (17%) and beer (9%), such that wine's share of alcohol consumption in China fell by two-fifths over those 3 years alone. The article examines the reasons behind the dramatic gyrations in this globally important market and their impact on wine-exporting countries, and speculates on future trends.

The announcements by President Trump in April 2025, of unilateral hikes of 10–50 percentage points on U.S. import tariffs on all countries’ goods, are under threat of coming into force on July 9, 2025. This article estimates their likely effects on trade in alcoholic beverages, using a global model of national beverage markets. Various scenarios are compared. They suggest that if the tariff hike was restricted to just 20% on goods from the European Union, the value of global trade in each of the three beverages would shrink by one-tenth. But the U.S. tariff hikes are to apply to all countries’ goods, which are estimated to shrink global exports by 13% for wine, 22% for spirits and 33% for beer. In that broader scenario, most countries’ wine exports would shrink, but exports of beer and spirits would expand for some countries thanks to the trade divergence generated by the varying tariff hikes. If the increasing uncertainty associated with these developments led to a cumulated 2% drop in consumer spending, virtually all wine-exporting countries would sell less wine to both the U.S. and the rest of the world. That is, wine trade destruction would outweigh trade diversion.

The study examines the influence of markups on the export decisions and subsequent export intensity of firms within the Hungarian wine sector. Additionally, we evaluate the impact of entering and sustaining a presence in export markets on firms’ markups and compare the markup levels between exporting and non-exporting firms. We find that markups have a positive impact on both the probability of exporting and the export intensity, which aligns with previous findings. We demonstrate that exporting leads to an increase in markups. We find that exporters maintain higher markups even when accounting for productivity differences. Additionally, exporting can lead to higher markups because of the learning-by-exporting phenomenon. The results have significant implications. The findings imply that markups have a significant impact on the decision-making process and performance of Hungarian wine exports. Policymakers should facilitate to increase the markups of firms in order to enhance the export of wine and promote economic growth. Wine exporting firms should enhance their productivity and implement strategic pricing strategies to increase their markups and expand their exports.

This paper studies the effects of the U.S. railroad expansion during the 19th century on exports of wine at the customs district level. I digitize previously unexploited data on wine trade flows for customs districts from 1870 to 1900 and combine these data with GIS-based measures of access to wine-producing regions for each district. I find that improved access to wine producers, driven by the ongoing construction of more railways, led to districts exporting more wine. My results suggest that the rollout of the U.S. railroad network had important effects on the spatial distribution of the wine trade across ports.

India is a leading producer as well as one of the largest exporters of rice. Export competitiveness of rice thus plays a crucial role in India’s overall trade scenario, particularly in bridging the gaps in country’s soaring trade deficits. The study investigates the impact of key determinants on India’s rice export competitiveness for the period 1990–2020 using the autoregressive distributed lag model. The results reveal that increasing yield of rice and depreciated exchange rate have significant positive impact on India’s rice export competitiveness. In the long run, production cost and export price have a detrimental effect on export of rice from India. However, India’s trade openness and export price do have a mixed effect on export competitiveness of rice in the short run. Moreover, the findings of this study offer some important policy implications for the stakeholders like farmers, exporters, and the government to improve export competitiveness of Agri-products including rice.

This paper revisits the role of skill distribution in shaping regional comparative advantage. Theoretically, we show that it is the relative skill dispersion between exporters and importers, rather than the absolute skill dispersion of exporters, that matters for the pattern of international trade. Using industry-level data on Chinese provincial export flows, we demonstrate that regions with a more dispersed skill distribution relative to their trading partners export more goods produced by sectors with lower skill complementarity. Exploring the potential mechanisms, we further find that the trade-promoting effect from relative skill dispersion probably operates through improving product quality and diversity.

The objective of this article is to explain the characteristics of the agri-food exporting boom experienced by the Latin American countries between 1994 and 2019 and its determining factors. In so doing, we analyse the evolution of exports, their composition by product, the principal origins and destinations, the importance of regional trade agreements and the behaviour of export prices. Furthermore, a series of gravity models are estimated, using the agri-food exports of nineteen Latin American countries to their 186 main trading partners between 1994 and 2019. These models are estimated for total agri-food exports and for their breakdown into three product groups. Among the main determinants identified, our results suggest that external demand and the proliferation of regional trade agreements were the primary reasons for this export boom. Finally, we evaluate these results within the context of the region's economic history.