Aid for Trade and Trade in Services
研究发现贸易援助对受援国商品和服务贸易的总体正向效应较弱，但针对经济基础设施、服务业生产能力和贸易政策的援助对小型经济体更有效，且不同服务部门效果差异大。
Existing research generally finds weak positive effects of aid for trade (AfT) on aggregate merchandise trade of recipients once endogeneity in the AfT-trade relationship is accounted for. In this paper, we confirm weak findings for both aggregate merchandise and services trade of recipients, using GMM and IV estimations. Moreover, estimates lose statistical significance if non-AfT explanatory variables are treated as endogenous in estimation suggesting identification issues may not have been adequately addressed in extant work. We then examine an alternative proposition: that effects of AfT and different categories of AfT may be observed along the conditional distributions of exports and imports. Our findings confirm this hypothesis. AfT allocated to economic infrastructure, productive capacity building in services and trade policies and regulation is more effective for smaller trading economies, especially in services. We also observe considerable heterogeneity in the trade effects of AfT allocated to individual services sectors, indicating the importance of country-specific diagnostics in targeting AfT allocation.