It is now widely accepted that economic integration agreements (EIAs) and other tradepolicy liberalizations contribute to nations' economic growth and development and help alleviate poverty. However, the economic effects of such policies vary across countries' economic structures; for instance, developing countries face higher fixed trade costs (partly due to higher government border-crossing costs and weaker port infrastructures). We offer three potential contributions. First, we extend a standard Melitz general equilibrium trade model with firm heterogeneity to show how variable-cost and fixed-cost "trade elasticities" associated with trade liberalizations are heterogeneous and endogenous to levels of country-pairs' bilateral policy and non-policy, variable and fixed trade costs-even allowing for CES preferences and an untruncated Pareto distribution of productivities. Using associated comparative statics, we provide several explicit predictions of the heterogeneous (variable-and fixed-cost) bilateral extensivemargin, intensive-margin, and trade elasticities. Second, we provide empirical support for the theoretical hypotheses. Trade elasticities vary across particular settings. Third, we demonstrate the relevance of these theoretical and empirical results for ex ante trade-flow predictions of potential EIAs. For instance, we show that a 10 percent lower average per capita income of a country-pair is associated with a 60 percent higher partial EIA effect. Moreover, we show empirically that 95-99 percent of the welfare (or probability) estimates of EIA liberalizations between 1,358 North-North, North-South, and South-South country-pairs can be explained by our heterogeneous EIA partial treatment effects.

This study investigates the factors that predict students' performance after transitioning from face‐to‐face to online learning as a result of the Covid‐19 pandemic. It uses students' responses from survey questions and the difference in the average assessment grades between pre‐lockdown and post‐lockdown at a South African university. We find that students' performance was positively associated with good wifi access, relative to using mobile internet data. We also observe lower academic performance for students who found transitioning to online difficult and who expressed a preference for self‐study (i.e. reading through class slides and notes) over assisted study (i.e. joining live lectures or watching recorded lectures). The findings suggest that improving digital infrastructure and reducing the cost of internet access may be necessary for mitigating the impact of the Covid‐19 pandemic on education outcomes.

The COVID-19 pandemic threatens to derail progress achieved in sustainable development. This study investigates the effectiveness of government policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, namely the number of deaths. Using the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) dataset for a global sample of countries between March and September 2020, we find a non-linear association between government response indices and the number of deaths. Less stringent interventions increase the number of deaths, whereas more severe responses to the pandemic can lower fatalities. The outcomes are similar for a sample of countries disaggregated by regions. These findings can be informative for policymakers in their efforts to mitigate the spread of the virus and save lives.

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