This Policy Note looks at impacts of European Union accession on agriculture and rural sectors, taking into account specific sectoral features and policy choices pre- and post-accession. The most important lesson learned from recently acceded member states is that policy choices before accession will largely determine whether the agriculture sector will be able to fully reap the benefits of EU membership, by expanding trade, or will struggle in the face of increased market pressure.

Many ex ante measures taken to reduce
disaster risk can deliver co-benefits that are not dependent
on disasters occurring. In fact, building resilience to
climate extremes and disasters can achieve multiple
objectives. These are secondary to the main objective of
disaster risk management of avoiding disaster losses, but
identifying and measuring additional co-benefits can enhance
the attractiveness of disaster risk management investments.

This Systematic Country Diagnostic (SCD)
explores how Uzbekistan can consolidate its recent
achievements and accelerate progress on the twin goals of
eradicating extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity.
The SCD is organized into five chapters. Chapter one frames
the issues of poverty reduction and shared prosperity, and
situates them in the context of Uzbekistan’s recent
development. It reviews the status and drivers of progress

Once concentrated among a few large
economies, global flows of goods, services, and capital now
reach an ever-larger number of countries worldwide. Global
trade in goods and in services both increased 10 times
between 1980 and 2011, while foreign direct investment (FDI)
flows increased almost 30-fold. A value chain is global when
some of these stages are carried out in more than one
country, most notably when discrete tasks within a

Costa Rica stands out for being among the most politically stable, progressive, prosperous, and environmentally conscious nations in the Latin America and the Caribbean region. Its development model has brought important economic, social, and environmental dividends, with sustained growth, upward mobility for a large share of the population, important gains in social indicators, and significant achievements in reforestation and conservation. However, there are a number of development challenges that need to be addressed to maintain the country’s successful development path.

The countries comprising the Southern
African Customs Union (SACU) are currently not very
integrated into global value chains (GVCs), potentially
missing out on important development opportunities.
Accordingly, we explore high level options for promoting
their integration. Given East Asia’s spectacular success
with integrating into GVCs, we first assess the probability
that SACU can copy their flying geese pattern. That was

The expansion of international trade has
been essential to development and poverty reduction. Todays
economy is unquestionable global. Trade as a proportion of
global GDP has approximately doubled since 1975. Markets for
goods and services have become increasingly integrated
through a fall in trade barriers, with technology helping
drive trade costs lower. But trade is not an end in itself.
People measure the value of trade by the extent to which it

This paper develops a novel methodology
to measure the quantity of jobs and value of wages embodied
in exports for a large number of countries and sectors for
intermittent years between 1995 and 2011. The resulting
Labor Content of Exports database allows the examination of
the direct contribution of labor to exports as well as the
indirect contribution via other sectors of the economy for
skilled and unskilled labor. The analysis of the new data

This reports focus is making global
value chains (GVCs) more inclusive. This is achieved by
overcoming participation constraints for Small and Medium
Enterprises (SMEs) and facilitation access for Low Income
Developing Countries (LIDCs).The two major points of this
report are 1) participation in GVCs is heterogeneous and
uneven, across and within countries and 2) available data
and survey-based evidence suggest that SME participation in

This paper studies the effects of
differences in local administrative burdens in Italy in the
years 2005–2007 preceding a major reform that sped up firm
registration procedures. Combining regulatory data from a
survey on Italian provinces before the reform (costs and
time to start a business) with industry-level entry rates of
limited liability firms, it explores the effects of
regulatory barriers on the average of the annual entry rates

Robust GDP growth continues, and real
growth for 2014 has been revised up by the authorities to
7.1 percent from an earlier estimate of 7.0 percent. Strong
domestic demand, boosted by a construction boom and
accommodated by high domestic credit growth, helps offset
the moderation in export growth with the slowdown of the
garment, tourism and agriculture sectors observed in the
first half of 2015. As an oil importer, the country benefits

The hub-periphery development pattern of
the Guangdong economy, to some extent, is a miniature of
that of the Chinese economy. The Pearl River Delta, drawing
from its first-nature comparative advantages in factor
endowments and proximity to Hong Kong SAR, China, and Macau
SAR, China, and the second-nature advantages as first-movers
in the reforms in attracting and retaining domestic and
foreign resources, has developed into a regional economic