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The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the effects of financial liberalization and trade openness on the economic growth of two countries, namely, Pakistan and India for the period 1985-2014.

This study uses the autoregressive distributed lag technique, which allows mixed order of integration. In addition, it uses the principal component method to create an index for financial liberalization to examine how it affects the economic growth of the selected countries.

The findings reveal that in the short and long run, trade openness has positive effect on the Pakistan’s economic growth while the financial liberalization has positive impact only in the long run. In the case of India, both financial liberalization and trade openness positively and significantly influence the economic growth in the short and long run.

By comparing the results of both countries, trade openness and financial liberalization increase the economic growth of India more than that of Pakistan. These results suggest that Pakistan should consider appropriate positive policies regarding financial liberalization and trade openness to achieve high and stable economic growth in the future.

This study creates financial liberalization index by using the principal component analysis method to explain the role of financial liberalization in the economic growth of Pakistan and India. In addition, it makes comparison of the results based on which country benefits most from the liberalization of trade and financial sectors. Only very few studies have examined these countries, yet their results have remained inconclusive as well.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of trade liberalization on economic growth of selected developing and least developed economies by augmenting standard production function.

The panel fixed effect model is used to estimate impacts of macroeconomic variables on economic growth. Real GDP million US$ is taken as proxy for economic growth. The capital stock series for each cross-section is generated from gross fixed capital formation. The total trade to GDP is taken as proxy for trade liberalization.

The result shows significant positive impact of selected macroeconomic variables on economic growth, except trade liberalization index. The one unit increase in trade liberalization deteriorates economic growth, of developing countries by −280.86 million US$ and least developing by −3555.09 million US$.

The significant negative impact indicates the relatively greater share of import than exports. The developing nations should develop production side and adopt export promotion policies besides managing imports for the achievement of sustainable growth.

This study uses augmented production function and constructed capital stock for individual countries. The total trade to GDP is taken as index for trade liberalization and was found to have significant negative impact.

The purpose of the paper is to investigate the quantitative effect of import liberalization on tariff revenue in Ghana.

In an attempt to achieve the objective of the paper, a robust decomposition analytical approach was used to examine how different components of the sources of change in import tax contribute to changes in import tax revenue in Ghana.

The paper concludes that Ghana suffered some revenue loss from the liberalization by reducing the level of average official duty rates, but gained in revenue as a result of real currency depreciation.

It has been suggested that public policy should aim at determining and targeting the optimum level of the average official import duty rates, focus on the identification of the major sources of duty revenue leakage, and substitute sales taxes for tariffs to improve tax revenue sufficiently.

This paper makes explicit the contribution of alternative import policy features to changes in import tax revenue in Ghana.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how trade liberalization influences rural poverty reduction in China.

The authors make use of China Family Panel Studies survey data, take annual income of farmers of RMB2,300 and RMB3,450 as the poverty lines (poverty line 1 and poverty line 2, respectively). Residents below poverty line 1 and poverty line 2 are 2,580 and 2,661, respectively. Probit model is used to estimate the impact of trade liberalization on the poverty probability. Income-deciding equation is used to estimate the impact of trade liberalization on the income level of poor residents in rural areas. Income-deciding equation is also used to examine the transmission mechanism of trade liberalization affecting rural poverty.

This study finds that trade liberalization can reduce the poverty probability of rural residents and promote the income growth of poor residents in rural areas. Trade liberalization increases the income of poor residents and reduces poverty through transmission mechanisms such as promoting economic growth and financial expenditure.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first empirical study to quantitatively model the impact of trade liberalization on rural poverty reduction in China using residents’ survey data.

The paper aims to investigate the relationship between trade liberalization and technology absorption in a less developing country context. The objective is to empirically test the relationship between these two variables. This analysis was conducted in Sub-Saharan African economies.

A panel regression of 20 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa was estimated based on a model that takes into account both trade policy and non-policy factors affecting technology absorption.

A positive and significant relationship was found between trade liberalization and technology absorption. This relationship is valid across a variety of model specifications, technology absorption proxies and estimation techniques. Moreover, non-policy factors such as geographical spillover play significant role in technology absorption.

The paper examines the link between the trade liberalization and the technology absorption in Sub-Saharan Africa. The analysis is empirical in nature and builds on panel estimations. The novelty of the paper comes from the topic investigated and the focus on a region which has not attracted much attention in the literature.

Trade and environment are essential issues closely related to the development of the national economy and the improvement of people’s livelihood in the new era. The Report to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) listed the construction of a strong trading power as an important part of building a modern economic system and pollution prevention and treatment as one of the three key battles to win the decisive victory of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects. However, the relationship between trade and environmental pollution is still very controversial in the existing literature, and there is a paucity of literature on the relationship between trade and environmental pollution based on micro data.

This paper merged China’s Firm-Level Pollution Database with China’s Industrial Enterprise Database and China’s industry tariff rates. Additionally, by virtue of the quasi-natural experiment of China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), a difference in difference (DID) model was constructed to alleviate the endogeneity issue.

According to the results, the trade barrier decrease (trade liberalization) significantly reduces the intensity of SO₂ emissions, a major pollutant of enterprises, as the intensity of SO₂ emissions decreased 2.16% for each unit decrease of the trade barrier. The analysis of the mechanisms shows that the SO₂ emission intensity of enterprises is mainly due to the decrease of enterprises’ pollution emission rather than the decrease of output, and the decrease of enterprises’ pollution emission is mainly caused by the enterprises’ cleaner production process rather than the end treatment of pollution emission. The decrease of coal use intensity is an important mechanism of the decrease of SO₂ emission intensity caused by the decrease of trade barriers. Among the technical effects of the change of the trade barrier affecting enterprises’ pollution emission, biased technical change rather than neutral technical change dominates.

The findings of this paper imply that expanding openness can enhance China’s social welfare not only through the economic growth mechanisms identified in the classical literature, but also through environmental improvements. This provides useful policy insights for promoting the construction of a strong trading power and winning the battle against pollution in the new era.

This study aims to examine the effect of trade liberalization on welfare, directly or indirectly, through the productivity of the agricultural sector and the productivity of the industrial sector, which affects economic growth and the welfare of the community.

This study is explanatory as it looks at causal relationships between one variable with another (causality relationship). The data used in this study are secondary data from various sources, such as the International Financial Statistics (IFS) from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, Bank Indonesia reports, Central Bureau of Statistics and several other sources. All data used in this study is annual data for each research variable from 1986 to 2016.

Based on the results of the analysis, there is a significant direct and negative influence of the agricultural sector productivity on economic growth, a significant direct and negative influence of the industrial sector productivity on economic growth.

Considering the diverse effects of trade liberalization both on economic growth and people's welfare in developing countries, the researcher was interested in knowing how trade liberalization affects Indonesia. This study tries to observe and analyze those relations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the behavior of governments in terms of trade policy design when they experience a lack of foreign resources from international trade after ensuring the sustainability of their external debt. To do so, the paper defines two concepts of trade space: “De Facto Trade Space” and “De Jure trade space.”

To conduct this study, the author relies on a panel data set comprising 109 countries over the period 1998–2014. To perform the empirical analysis, the author has mainly used the system generalized methods of moments approach.

The empirical analysis suggests evidence that trade space matters significantly for trade policy. Indeed, “De Facto Trade Space” is consistently associated with greater trade policy liberalization, with this positive effect being higher, the higher the development level – proxied by the real per capita income – of the concerned country. “De Jure Trade Space” tends to lead to greater trade policy liberalization in less advanced developing countries, but is associated with the adoption of trade restrictive measures in more advanced countries. Additionally, results suggest different impacts on trade policy of “Positive De Jure Trade Space” and “Negative De Jure Trade Space.”

These findings suggest that the trade space, as defined in this study, plays a key role in trade policy design by policymakers.

The current study shows that trade space could significantly matter for trade policy design by policymakers.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the study dealing directly with the “trade space” concept as well as its impact on trade policy.

Russia is one of the fastest growing emerging economies and large Russian companies, mainly resource exporters, have entered the global markets in recent years. The internationalization process of Russian enterprises and its implications on foreign direct investment paradigms have attracted global interest. This paper studies the effect of internationalization on the performance of large Russian companies (state‐owned, privatized and de‐novo). The results show that international operations have a significant effect on company performance indicators. Companies with international operations have significantly higher profitability and labor productivity. However, profitability or labor productivity is not significantly higher in the early years of trade liberalization. The positive effects grow gradually with the integration of Russian companies to world markets. Specifically, the expansion of the de‐novo private sector has been strong.

Brazil, a large developing economy whose main exports consist of primary commodities, benefited greatly from the boom in commodity prices during the first decade of the current century. However, with a large share of its population with low and very low incomes, there is a potential for some adverse redistributive effects. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue by simulating the ex ante effects using a mixed endogenous–exogenous social accounting matrix (SAM) price model.

The methodology consists of two parts. First, using a mixed endogenous–exogenous SAM price model, the authors obtain the elasticities of domestic prices (goods, services and factors) in response to the increase in international prices of three types of commodities: agricultural, oil/gas and minerals. Second, the authors run micro-simulations at the household level on welfare effects, as well as on some distributive indices. Analysis at the regional level is also carried out.

Following increases in the international prices of primary commodities, the responses of internal prices (goods, services and factors) mean a welfare loss all over the entire distribution of household per capita expenditure; the least affected are those households at the low end and around the median of the distribution. However, the differences among households are not very important. Moreover, once we take into account government transfers and payments from social security, the magnitude of the effects reduces even further. Also, inequality indices and poverty rates show little responsiveness to the simulated shocks. Finally, poorer regions are the most likely to be affected, but also the distribution of effects across households shows differences between regions.

Economies with comparative advantages in the production of primary commodities can benefit at a macro-level from the increase in the international prices of such commodities. However, when a large part of the population spends a high proportion of its income on goods whose prices may be affected by the increase in commodity prices, there is a room for some undesirable effects from a redistributive standpoint. This study provides valuable results about such potential effects for Brazil, a large developing economy.