Julien Gourdon

• PhD
• Economist at Agence Française de Développement (AFD)

This paper evaluates the effects of the FAMEX export promotion program in Tunisia on the performance of beneficiary firms. While much of the literature assesses only the short-term impact of such programs, the paper considers also the longer-term impact. Propensity-score matching, difference-in-difference, and weighted least squares estimates sugge...

This paper builds on theoretical predictions that show that gains from regional integration are unevenly distributed between resource rich and poor countries. It explores the effects of different integration schemes in the Middle East and North Africa. The results suggest that within the Pan Arab Free Trade Agreement, there is significant trade cre...

Combining for the first time a new dataset of non-tariff measures (NTMs) in 65 countries with the CEPII's unit values database, we estimate average ad-valorem equivalents (AVEs) for SPS, TBT and other measures by section of the Harmonized System of product classification. While most existing AVEs are obtained from indirect quantity-based estimation...

Nous avons souhaité dresser un panorama du secteur minier; analyser la contribution réelle aux économies; cerner les enjeux de gouvernance et d'impact environnementaux et sociaux; et évaluer les perspective et stratégies de transformation des minerais sur le continent

With the acceleration of the energy and digital transitions, global demand for critical minerals has grown exponentially in recent years. Africa, with its extensive and still relatively unexploited reserves, hopes to take advantage of this opportunity to support its industrialization trajectory, based on increased local processing of its minerals,...

Rules of Origin (RoO) are critical components of Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs). They are designed to stop products coming into a PTA through the partner that applies the lowest tariff – a phenomenon known as trade deflection. While RoO are necessary, complex RoO may undo the benefits of trade agreements. Using a novel database of RoO, this p...

Rules of Origin (RoO) are critical components of Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs). They are designed to stop products coming into a PTA through the partner that applies the lowest tariff – a phenomenon known as trade deflection. While RoO are necessary, complex RoO may undo the benefits of trade agreements. Using a novel database of RoO, this p...

Entre 2000 et 2015, l’Afrique a bénéficié d’une croissance soutenue portée par une forte vague d’investissements directs étrangers et marquée par un net recul de la pauvreté [Osman, 2020]. Cependant, il restait à intensifier une transformation structurelle, permettant à la fois d’absorber le surplus de main-d’œuvre agricole, de réduire la dépendanc...

To become operational, the Africa Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) must harmonize Rules of Origin (ROO) across Africa's Preferential Trade Agreements, usually defined at the level of the Regional Economic Communities (RECs). Negotiators have agreed on a set of common Regime-Wide (RWRs) rules and on about 82% of the expected different Product-Sp...

Our study shows that China's export value-added tax (VAT) rebate system is a major industrial policy that affects its exports. We use export data at the HS6-product level for a panel of 329 Chinese cities over the 2003-12 period to assess how changes in the export VAT tax have affected China's export performance. We consider different trade margins...

An explosion of different Rules of Origin (ROO) has accompanied the spread of Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) around the world. Often tailor-made, these ROO are there to prevent trade deflection and transshipment. For developing countries, protection of regional producers of intermediate products in supply chains can be an important-if not the...

To become operational, the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) must harmonize Rules of Origin (ROO) across Africa’s Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) along two dimensions: regime-wide rules and product-specific rules. This paper describes and evaluates these ROO across the major multiple-membership PTAs engaged in these harmonization ne...

Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) provisions and Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) generally raise trade costs, but by providing a positive signal to consumers that enhances confidence in imported products they can also expand trade. This paper seeks to identify which specific elements of SPS and TBT measures are particularly trade enhancing. It inv...

Rules of origin (RoOs) are critical components of preferential trade agreements (PTAs), but their implications for the development of global value chains (GVCs) are not well understood. RoOs establish the conditions that products must meet to be eligible for preferential market access. In cases where products are produced entirely within the bounda...

This report builds on the OECD’s longstanding work measuring government support in agriculture, fossil fuels, fisheries, and more recently in the aluminium value chain in order to estimate producer support and related market distortions in the semiconductor value chain. Results for 21 large firms operating across the semiconductor value chain indic...

A number of countries used discriminatory government procurement policies as part of stimulus packages designed to alleviate the effects of the global economic crisis. This article collates and updates the evidence related to the size of procurement markets, the level of home bias they exhibit, and the effectiveness of multilateral and bilateral pr...

Although global value chain (GVCs) participation in Southeast Asia has been growing, little is known about whether the benefits from participation are accruing to larger firms or if small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), which make up the majority of companies and employ the bulk of the domestic workforce, are also able to take advantage of the...

This chapter seeks to fill some of these evidence gaps. It aims to collect available information, based on indirect estimation methods, to give an updated picture of the size of government procurement in ASEAN and to look at the trend since the mid-nineties. It looks at the available evidence of discrimination using output-based approaches. It uses...

Concerns are growing about policies and measures that restrict market access with the effect of “forcing” technology transfer. Efforts to target forced technology transfer are complicated by the sometimes blurred line between voluntary and mutually agreed upon technology transfers and that which is perceived to be, or is in fact, compelled. This st...

This report builds on the OECD’s longstanding work measuring government support in agriculture, fossil fuels, and fisheries in order to estimate support and related market distortions in the aluminium value chain. Results show that non-market forces, and government support in particular, appear to explain some of the recent increases in aluminium-...

Nous utilisons une nouvelle méthode économétrique pour estimer les effets sur le commerce des mesures non tarifaires pour environ 5 000 biens échangés et pour 86 pays. Celle-ci distingue explicitement plusieurs types de mesures et détermine leurs effets distincts sur les volumes et les prix des échanges commerciaux. Cette dernière caractéristique p...

High levels of trade costs persist in the world trading system, despite recent progress in tariff reduction, trade facilitation, and logistics. At least some of these costs can be attributed to non-tariff measures (NTMs), policies imposed by governments other than ordinary customs duties which have an impact on the price at which exports and import...

A novel econometric method is used to estimate trade effects of non-tariff measures (NTMs) for roughly 5 000 traded goods and 80 countries. It explicitly distinguishes several types of measures and ascertains their distinct effects on trade volumes and prices. The latter feature allows disentangling trade-cost effects associated with non-tariff mea...

A number of countries used discriminatory government procurement policies as part of stimulus packages designed to alleviate the effects of the global economic crisis. This paper collates and updates the evidence related to the size of procurement markets, the level of home bias they exhibit, and the effectiveness of multilateral and bilateral proc...

This paper investigates the motives behind China's fiscal policy targeting exports. It relies on detailed data at the product level over the period 2002–2012. We analyze two major export fiscal instruments: export tax and export VAT rebate. Our results suggest that while pursuing many objectives simultaneously, Chinese policy used the two instrumen...

In spite of widespread tariff reductions, intra-African borders remain ‘thick’. Regional trade is inhibited by inadequate transportation infrastructure but also by various non-tariff measures (NTMs). This paper combines price data from the World Bank's International Comparison Project with a new database on NTMs to estimate their effect on consumer...

The demand for accountability in 'Aid-for-Trade' (AFT) is increasing but monitoring has focused on case studies and impressionistic narratives. The paper reviews recent evidence from a wide range of studies, recognising that a multiplicity of approaches is needed to learn what works and what does not. The review concludes that there is some support...

Cette revue de la littérature présente dans une première partie les contraintes d’accès au crédit des PME auxquelles ces mécanismes de soutien sont sensés répondre afin de déterminer les composantes de ces programmes qu’il est pertinent d’étudier. Toujours dans cette première partie, nous discutons les différentes méthodes d’évaluation d’impact et...

Impact evaluation of guarantee schemes: some lessons The evaluation of credit guarantee schemes provided to very small and small firms is recent. However, its rapid development over the last decade provides some interesting lessons on the difficulties faced during the implementation of such schemes, on the ways to bypass them and on their results....

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is much more than another preferential trade agreement project: it aims to link the world's two biggest economic entities. The initiative seems motivated by the stalemate in multilateral negotiations, the competition between trade agreements, and the willingness of the two partners to retain...

Dans un article théorique récent, Venables (2011) montre que lorsqu’une intégration régionale est créée entre pays pauvres et riches en ressources naturelles, les gains de l’intégration sont inégalement répartis entre les deux catégories de pays. Nous testons cette théorie sur les accords régionaux de la région Moyen-Orient et Afrique du Nord, nota...

Given the complexity of the issues surrounding the concept of sustainable tourism, the current paper tries to provide a unified methodology to assess tourism sustainability, based on a number of quantitative indicators. The proposed methodological framework (Sustainable Tourism Benchmarking Tool – STBT) will provide a number of benchmarks against w...

HIGHLIGHTS IMPORT BANS … reduce the amount and increase the price of the controlled goods. The justification for such policies is usually that with protection, domestic firms will increase output and jobs. But in practice import bans can just lead to higher profits for domestic firms. IN NIGERIA… importation of 24 groups of items is currently prohi...

The relationship between trade liberalization and inequality has received considerable attention in recent years. The major purpose of this study is to present new results on the sources of wage inequalities in manufacturing taking into account South–South (S–S) trade. Globalization has not only lead to increasing North–South (N–S) trade, but it ha...

Introduction: Among the root causes of the current political turmoil in the MENA region are the large number of unemployed but increasingly educated youth. For the region to achieve stability, it will have to ensure a more inclusive and faster growth path and find enough jobs for this cohort. Exports will play a key role in moving in this direction...

The starting point of this paper is given by country situations where trade liberalization is expected to be poverty and inequality alleviating in the long run while inducing a short run increase in poverty or in inequality. The question we ask is what are the distributive aspects of trade which are worth documenting to better help governments inte...

An empirical tradition in international trade seeks to establish whether the predictions of factor abundance theory match with the data. The relation between factor endowments and trade in goods (commodity version of Hecksher-Ohlin) provide mildly encouraging empirical results. But in the analysis of factor service trade and factor endowments (fact...

Using tariffs as a measure of openness, this paper finds consistent evidence that the conditional effects of trade liberalization on inequality are correlated with relative factor endowments. Trade liberalization, measured by changes in tariff revenues, is associated with increases in inequality in countries well-endowed with highly skilled workers...

This thesis “Essays on Trade Liberalization and Income Inequality in Developing Countries” is in three essays. The first chapter “Explaining Trade Flows: Traditional and New Determinants of Trade Patterns” deals with the hypothesis that countries trade according to their factor endowments: this is the factor abundance theory of Hecksher-Ohlin. Th...

Document de travail du DIAL ; DT 2007-11

Using tariffs as a measure of openness, the authors find consistent evidence that the conditional effects of trade liberalization on inequality are correlated with relative factor endowments. Trade liberalization is associated with increases in inequality in countries well-endowed in highly skilled workers and capital or with workers that have very...