Trade/Foreign Direct Investment

Special Economic Zones (SEZ) have played an important role in Panama's successful growth story over the previous decade. SEZ have attracted local and foreign investment by leveraging a business-friendly environment of low transaction costs, and created many stable, well-paid jobs for Panamanians. Beyond that, SEZ shall be assessed as place-based policy by their capacity to boost structural transformations, namely attracting new skills and more complex know-how not to be found in the domestic economy.

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the three largest SEZ in Panama:

• Colon Free Zone
• Panama-Pacific
• City of Knowledge

Our results suggest that SEZ have been successful as measured by static indicators, such as foreign investment, job creation and productivity. We also find that SEZ have boosted inflows of high-skill immigrants, who are most likely generating positive knowledge spillovers on Panamanians productivity and wages. However, significant legal instruments and institutional designs are preventing Panama from taking full advantage of the skill variety hosted at the SEZ. Complex immigration processes inhibiting foreigners from transitioning out of the SEZ, a long list of restricted professions and even citizenships considered as a national security concern, are hindering the flow of knowledge, keeping the benefits coming from more complex multinational companies locked inside the gates of SEZ.

This document explores Albanian aquaculture in the context of European aquaculture and compares it to neighboring countries, especially Greece. Using information from fieldwork, multiple reports by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and interviews with experts in government and non-government institutions, we analyze the production of European seabass and Gilthead seabream in Europe in general and in Albania in particular. Albanian cultivation of seabass and seabream has increased sevenfold since production started in the early 2000’s, but it represented only 0.38% of European aquaculture of these two species in 2013. Albania has significantly lower productivity than its neighbors, especially Greece, the dominant actor in the market. The analysis indicates that Albania’s lower productivity is caused by: (i) high costs of cages, fingerlings, and feed; which are all imported; (ii) lack of a formal fish market; and (iii) lack of clarity in the regulation. The document concludes by offering recommendations to get over these impediments for growth including reducing tariffs; encouraging national production of cages, fingerlings, and feed through investment in research; offering more and better financing options for cage acquisition; improving quality controls; establishing a national fish market; and passing the Aquaculture Law to bring clarity to the sector regulation.

Economists have long discussed the negative effect of Dutch disease episodes on the non-resource tradable sector as a whole, but little has been said on its impact on the composition of the non-resource export sector. This paper fills this gap by exploring to what extent concentration of a country’s non-resource export basket is determined by their exports of natural resources. We present a theoretical framework that shows how upward pressure in wages caused by a resource windfall results in higher export concentration. We then document two robust empirical findings consistent with the theory. First, using data on discovery of oil and gas fields and of commodity prices as sources of exogenous variation, we find that countries with larger shares of natural resources in exports have more concentrated non-resource export baskets. Second, we find capital-intensive exports tend to dominate the export basket of countries prone to Dutch disease episodes.

Listen to the podcast interview with the authors

Despite their historic and ethnic ties, trade and investment between Albania and Kosovo remains underdeveloped. To be sure, even if fully developed, Kosovo is unlikely to play a major role in Albanian external economic relations. Nonetheless, increased economic integration between the two countries can serve as the basis not only for enhancing the ties between the two countries, but also for spurring the measures that could act as a springboard for Albania’s integration with respect to other countries in the Balkans as well as with the EU.  

This paper clarifies how dark matter changes our assessment of the US external imbalance. Dark matter assets are defined as the capitalized value of the return privilege obtained by US assets. Because this return privilege has been steady over recent decades, it is likely to persist in the future or even to increase, as it becomes leveraged by an increasingly globalized world. Once this is included in future projections of US current accounts, the US external position looks much more balanced than depicted in official statistics.