Publication Categories

This note addresses development partner initiative in trade policy reforms. Initiatives within this area can be subdivided into direct policy-reform support and institutional support directed at policy reforms. In the former, the assistance is associated with a cash transfer program linked to specific policy reforms or a conditionality loan linked to certain aspects of a government’s program; in the latter case, the support is offered through capacity development specifically oriented towards the design and implementation of specific reforms and structural adjustments. Impact assessments of trade policy reforms can be readily extended to the quantification of development partner contributions from their policy-based cash transfer programs and conditionality lending. In other instances where the institutional support for reform has been the channel of assistance its measurable impact on the country’s trade performance can be more difficult to glean. The aim of this note is to suggest some quantitative tools that can be invoked to ascribe changes brought about by policy reforms to development partner support for those reforms. It is concerned with attributions to specific reform-related impacts on economic activity, rather than broad program support measures on country-wide economic activity that use cross-section data sets to generalize findings across groups of countries [9]. Application of the proposed tools discussed in this note therefore depends on the availability of specific data for development partner disbursements for particular policy-reform programs and project-specific initiatives within those programs.