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Human capital—that is, resources associated with the knowledge and skills of individuals—is a critical component of economic development 1 , 2 . Learning metrics that are comparable for countries globally are necessary to understand and track the formation of human capital. The increasing use of international achievement tests is an important step in this direction 3 . However, such tests are administered primarily in developed countries 4 , limiting our ability to analyse learning patterns in developing countries that may have the most to gain from the formation of human capital. Here we bridge this gap by constructing a globally comparable database of 164 countries from 2000 to 2017. The data represent 98% of the global population and developing economies comprise two-thirds of the included countries. Using this dataset, we show that global progress in learning—a priority Sustainable Development Goal—has been limited, despite increasing enrolment in primary and secondary education. Using an accounting exercise that includes a direct measure of schooling quality, we estimate that the role of human capital in explaining income differences across countries ranges from a fifth to half; this result has an intermediate position in the wide range of estimates provided in earlier papers in the literature 5 – 13 . Moreover, we show that average estimates mask considerable heterogeneity associated with income grouping across countries and regions. This heterogeneity highlights the importance of including countries at various stages of economic development when analysing the role of human capital in economic development. Finally, we show that our database provides a measure of human capital that is more closely associated with economic growth than current measures that are included in the Penn world tables version 9.0 14 and the human development index of the United Nations 15 . Analyses of a global database reveal that in many developing countries progress in learning remains limited despite increasing enrolment in primary and secondary education, and uncover links between human capital and economic development.

Under the Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights, the World Trade Organization members are required to enforce product patents for pharmaceuticals. In this paper we empirically investigate the welfare effects of this requirement on developing countries using data for the fluoroquinolones subsegment of the systemic anti-bacterials segment of the Indian pharmaceuticals market. Our results suggest that concerns about the potential adverse welfare effects of TRIPS may have some basis. We estimate that the withdrawal of all domestic products in this subsegment is associated with substantial welfare losses to the Indian economy, even in the presence of price regulation. The overwhelming portion of this welfare loss derives from the loss of consumer welfare.

This paper examines how prices, markups, and marginal costs respond to trade liberalization. We develop a framework to estimate markups from production data with multi-product firms. This approach does not require assumptions on the market structure or demand curves faced by firms, nor assumptions on how firms allocate their inputs across products. We exploit quantity and price information to disentangle markups from quantity-based productivity, and then compute marginal costs by dividing observed prices by the estimated markups. We use India's trade liberalization episode to examine how firms adjust these performance measures. Not surprisingly, we find that trade liberalization lowers factory-gate prices and that output tariff declines have the expected pro-competitive effects. However, the price declines are small relative to the declines in marginal costs, which fall predominantly because of the input tariff liberalization. The reason for this incomplete cost pass-through to prices is that firms offset their reductions in marginal costs by raising markups. Our results demonstrate substantial heterogeneity and variability in markups across firms and time and suggest that producers benefited relative to consumers, at least immediately after the reforms.

This paper provides evidence on the patterns of multiproduct firm production in a large developing country, India, during a period that spans market reforms. In the cross-section, multiproduct firms in India look remarkably similar to their U.S. counterparts. The time-series patterns, however, exhibit important differences. In contrast to evidence from the United States, product churning, particularly product rationalization, is far less common in India. We find no link between product rationalization and output tariff declines following India's 1991 trade liberalization. The lack of \"creative destruction\" is consistent with the role of industrial regulation in preventing an efficient allocation of resources.

The authors discuss recent empirical research on how globalization has affected income inequality in developing countries. They begin with a discussion of conceptual issues regarding the measurement of globalization and inequality. Next, they present empirical evidence on the evolution of globalization and inequality in several developing countries during the 1980s and 1990s. The authors then examine the channels through which globalization may have affected inequality, discussing theory and evidence in parallel. They conclude with directions for future research.

In this article, we introduce an empirical framework to analyze how firm performance is affected by increased globalization. Using this framework, we discuss recent work on measuring the impact of various shocks firms face in the global marketplace, such as reductions in trade costs (through lowering tariffs and abolishing quotas). Our analytical framework nests most empirical approaches to estimating the impact of trade and industrial policies on firms active in international markets. We identify outstanding issues surrounding the identification of the underlying mechanisms and conclude with suggestions for future research.

New goods play a central role in many trade and growth models. We use detailed trade and firm-level data from India to investigate the relationship between declines in trade costs, imports of intermediate inputs, and domestic firm product scope. We estimate substantial gains from trade through access to new imported inputs. Moreover, we find that lower input tariffs account on average for 31% of the new products introduced by domestic firms. This effect is driven to a large extent by increased firm access to new input varieties that were unavailable prior to the trade liberalization.

Extreme poverty as defined by the World Bank was dramatically reduced and expected to be eliminated in all but a small number of institutionally fragile countries, partly thanks to dramatic growth in East Asian countries. While many factors contributed to this rise in living standards, openness and other market-oriented policies played an essential role. [...]the Western world enjoyed a historically rare long period of peace that fostered prosperity. There is substantial economic research documenting these distributional effects, which had a distinct geographic component: communities more exposed to import competition from low-wage countries thanks to preexisting spatial industrialization patterns did worse than communities that were sheltered from imports.

Early in 2020, the general expectation was that the coronavirus pandemic’s effects would be more severe in developing countries than in advanced economies, on both the public health and economic fronts. Preliminary evidence as of July 2020 supports a more optimistic assessment. To date, most low–and middle-income countries have a significantly lower death toll per capita than richer countries, a pattern that can be partially explained by younger populations and limited obesity. On the economic front, emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) have seen massive capital outflows and large price declines for certain commodities, especially oil and nonprecious metals, but net capital outflows are in line with earlier commodity price shocks. While there is considerable heterogeneity in how specific countries will be affected in the short and medium run, we are cautiously optimistic that financial markets in the largest EMDEs, especially those not reliant on energy and metal exports, could recover quickly—assuming the disease burden is ultimately not as dire in these countries. In the long run, the highest costs may be due to the indirect effects of virus containment policies on poverty, health, and education as well as the effects of accelerating deglobalization on EMDEs. An important caveat is that there is still considerable uncertainty about the future course of the pandemic and the consequences of new waves of infections.

This article provides evidence that trade reform might have benefited India firms not only by providing access to more and cheaper inputs, but also, crucially, through importing new input goods and varieties as trade barriers fell. While this work focuses on a particular developing country, India, Estevadeordal and Taylor (2008) offer cross-country evidence that declines in tariffs on capital and intermediate goods can raise GDP growth in countries that implement trade reforms. This suggests that the microeconomic mechanisms uncovered from detailed analyses of firms in specific developing countries may be generalizable. More generally, the availability of detailed firm and trade flow data enables researchers to explore the exact mechanisms through which international trade affects the performance of domestic firms, and ultimately productivity growth. Examining the microfoundation of the link between international trade and growth will thus likely continue to be a promising area of research.