Jose Guilherme Reis

Trade competitiveness diagnostic toolkit

This Trade Competitiveness Diagnostic (TCD) toolkit provides a framework, guidelines, and practical tools needed to conduct an analysis of trade competitiveness. The toolkit can be used to assess the competitiveness of a countrys overall basket of exports, as well as specific traded sectors. It includes guidance on a range of tools and indicators that can be used to analyze trade performance in terms of growth, orientation, diversification, quality, and survival, as well as quantitative and qualitative approaches to analyze the market and supply-side factors that determine competitiveness. The toolkit facilitates the identification of the main constraints to improved trade competitiveness and the policy responses to overcome these constraints. The output of a TCD initiative can be used for a wide variety of purposes. The TCD toolkit is intended for policy makers and practitioners involved in analysis of trade performance and design of trade and industrial policy.

The investment climate in Brazil, India, and South Africa : a comparison of approaches for sustaining economic growth in emerging economies

This book seeks to contribute to the sharing of knowledge between Brazil, India, and South Africa, three of the largest emerging economies today. By assessing and comparing the investment climate in each, the authors seek to profile concrete steps that countries can take to improve the business environment. The authors focus particularly on identifying the commonalities and differences both within and among the three countries and attempt to highlight examples where policy makers will be able to drawn on the lessons from their own reform experiences and those of their counterparts in other core emerging markets. The book is organized as follows: (1) Provides a brief overview of the investment climate in each of the three countries, highlighting the key constraints identified by the national business communities, and explains the underlying concepts of the investment climate assessments and doing business indicators. (2) Examines the macroeconomic performance of Brazil, India, and South Africa and shows how the three countries perform with regard to taxation and foreign trade and exchange. (3) Reviews key microeconomic regulations, such as rules regarding the entry and exit of firms and labor regulations, and assesses the enforcement of contracts and regulations. (4) Studies the set of services, factors, and conditions that firms require when establishing operations and engaging in production and exchange, including access to finance, physical infrastructure, cost and availability of labor, and security. (5) Offers guidance on how to manage investment climate reforms by showcasing best-practice examples from recent reforms in Brazil, India, and South Africa.

Travel Channel Meets Discovery Channel or How Tourism Can Encourage Better Export Performance and Diversification in Nepal

Entering and surviving in export markets is a costly process that involves learning about the existence of foreign demand, ‘discovering’ production costs, building up reputation, succeeding in product branding to reduce competitive pressures and to upgrade quality to serve demanding international clients, and remaining competitive in the marketplace. This article argues that tourism alleviates some of these costs by providing an inexpensive platform for cost discovery and by acting as an accessible ‘in-house’ trade fair for domestic producers. It combines product-level data on world and Nepal’s exports with Nepalese data on tourist inflows, and macro-indicators on relative prices. For tourism-related goods, it reveals a positive association between tourist inflows from given destinations with future merchandise exports to those destinations, while no association is found for goods unrelated to tourism. The results suggest spillovers from tourism into merchandise export performance and diversification and gains from cooperation between tourism and export promotion.

Trade Liberalization and Integration of Domestic Output Markets in Brazil

This paper describes how different policy distortions have been impeding better integration of Brazils external and internal product markets and discusses how these distortions have prevented domestic firms from benefiting from multiple sources of efficiency gains. The paper first focuses on the costs of barriers to global integration, followed by an overview of policy induced stringencies hampering domestic integration. Drawing from general and partial equilibrium analyses, the paper also provides evidence of potential impacts of removing some of those distortions and discusses policy options to promote better allocation of resources across the economy. The main conclusion of the paper is that Brazil could gain significantly from opening to foreign trade. Yet, for Brazil to take full advantage of the opportunities that external integration offers, domestic markets also need to function better, so it is key to ensure that the removal of external barriers to integration is coordinated with the removal of internal distortions to domestic market integration.

Jobs and growth : Brazil’s productivity agenda

Brazil enters the election year 2018 with an economy that is gradually recovering from the deepest recession in its recent economic history. This book is motivated by the need to understand the possible drivers of future income and employment growth. Shifting Brazil’s production structure to be the same as that of the United States will raise productivity by just 68 percent; making all Brazilian industries work as efficiently as their counterparts in the United States will boost productivity more than four times. This book analyses some of the factors that may be behind such low productivity. Among the most important: (a) a lack of competition both internally, thanks to a business environment that favors incumbents and hampers innovation and entry, and externally, due to high-tariff and nontariff barriers to trade; (b) government policies that have concentrated on subsidizing existing firms, and distorting capital and labor markets, rather than fostering competition and innovation; and (c) fragmented government institutions for business support that have allowed policies to persist without much regard for whether or not they had shown to be effective. The book recommends a policy shift in all three areas, with the ultimate objective to change the relationship between business and the state from one governed by perks and privileges to one built on creating a level playing field that incentivizes initiative and supports workers and firms to adjust to the demands of the market. This book fits into the context of a growing policy debate about what should be Brazil’s future development model.

Determinants of Export Growth at the Extensive and Intensive Margins: Evidence from Product and Firm-Level Data for Pakistan

As globalization progresses and investment is mobile, it is ever more important for policy makers to understand drivers of growth and exports at the micro-level: Which products are being produced and exported? Which firms populate the domestic economy? Are they successful in exporting? How are firms affected by exogenous shocks and policy intervention? Through the use of descriptive statistics and econometric analysis, this paper assesses the trade competitiveness of Pakistan using micro-data. The case of Pakistan is interesting since the countrys recent trade policy has reverted to a protectionist path since the mid-2000s and trade performance is stagnating, as indicated by a decrease in its trade-to-gross domestic product ratio over the past decade and low levels of sophistication of exports. The main findings of the paper are the following. Like many other countries, Pakistan posts a high concentration of exports in the hands of a limited number of large exporters. The dominance of few exporters has increased over time and it seems associated with the changes in trade policy. Low rates of product innovation and experimentation and a low ability of the Pakistani export sector to enter into new higher growth sectors are other features emerging from the data. All in all, the mediocre performance seems to be associated with internal problems with trade-related incentives, business environment, and governance, in addition to the well-known external constraints.