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This paper quantifies the trade creation effects of South Asia's trade agreements within the region and with the rest of the world. The paper uses an extensive database of bilateral trade covering the manufacturing, agriculture, and service sectors in 190 countries over 1990-2015. The estimates of various specifications of a structural gravity model, including domestic trade flows, capture the potential heterogeneous effects. The main finding is that these effects are in general stronger for trade agreements signed by South Asian countries and even stronger in the case of intraregional agreements. The effects of free trade agreements vary substantially among countries and sectors and between final and intermediate goods. The paper shows that the trade policy implemented in South Asia in the previous decades has been successful, but at the same time the results point toward the existence of clear missing opportunities for the region. The opportunities lay in (i) better backward integration with the rest of the world to improve efficiency and help strengthen exports, and (ii) further deepening of intraregional agreements to continue making progress in regional integration.

Tariff --- Law and legislation

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Regulatory compliance is key in the fight against climate change and other environmental challenges. But regulatory agencies, especially in developing countries, are often hampered by their capacity to monitor and enforce standards and regulations against recalcitrant firms. There is now a big push toward self-reporting whereby the firms monitor and report on their compliance levels vis-a-vis the standards. This is seen as a way around the costs that agencies must incur if they were to scale up their inspections. In this paper, extensive firm-level data from India are used to compare the compliance level of firms when they are inspected by agencies versus the times when they self-report. Other factors that may determine regulatory compliance, such as age, size, sector, location, and so forth, are also examined. The results indicate that compliance rates are higher in the case of self-reporting than in the case of inspection, suggesting that there is a need to reform the self-report mechanism. Newer and privately owned firms are more compliant. There are also differences between complying with air and water pollution. Finally, the paper examines whether environmental monitoring through inspections leads to improvement in compliance levels, to assess the effectiveness of the regulations and inspections. The findings suggest that the increase in compliance is limited to a few industries.

Climate Change and Environment --- Climate Change Mitigation --- Development --- Environment --- Environmental Protection --- Environmental Regulation --- Inspection --- Pollution Control --- Pollution Management and Control --- Public Sector Development --- Regulatory Compliance --- Self-Reporting

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This paper examines the performance of globally engaged firms in Argentina in the past decade. Using highly disaggregated firm-level customs transaction data for imports and exports, the paper documents the progressive retreat of Argentine firms from global markets. Between 2007 and 2017, the number of exporters decreased by 30 percent. Benchmarking the characteristics of these exporters with similar countries reveals that Argentine exporters are disproportionally fewer and individually larger, with export value extremely concentrated in a few firms. Firm churning rates are disproportionately low and survival rates of entrants are high. These findings reflect exceptionally high entry costs of export, which are the result of anti-export bias and import substitution policies that sought unsuccessfully to develop the local industry. The paper shows that exporters that import directly intermediate and capital goods have better export outcomes than other exporters.

Allocative Efficiency --- Export Concentration --- Export Performance --- Exporter Dynamics --- Exporter Growth --- Firm Entry --- Firm-Level Data --- Global Market --- Import Substitution --- Imports --- Industrial Policy --- International Economics and Trade --- Private Sector Development --- Value Chain