Paula Bustos
ICREA Research Professor
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
International trade, development economics
What's new
🔊 Women in Economics Mentoring and Networking Retreat. Application deadline 28 February. Held with the EEA-ESEM Congress, Bordeaux, August 2025.
📢📢 Call for papers for the Development Economics Workshop held within the Barcelona School of Economics Summer Forum.
📅 Dates: 18-19 June 2025.
📍 Location: Barcelona
Organizers: Paula Bustos (ICREA-UPF, IPEG, BSE), Giacomo De Giorgi (IEE/GSEM-U. Geneva), Andre Groeger (UAB-BSE), Gianmarco León-Ciliotta (UPF, IPEG, BSE) and Dean Yang (U. Michigan).
⏳ Deadline for applications: 28 February
🔗More information: https://bse.eu/summer-forum
Research overview
My research can be described as empirical investigations in economic development guided by international trade theory. My first line of research studied the effects of a regional free trade agreement between Argentina and Brazil. I showed that it induced firms to export and innovate but reduced the demand for unskilled labor in the manufacturing sector. A second line of research studies the effect of the adoption of new agricultural technologies, such as GM crops, on economic development in Brazil. Unskilled workers lost their jobs in agriculture but reallocated to the local manufacturing sector. This inflow if unskilled workers reduced local innovation and growth. However, agricultural productivity growth also led to savings and capital flows towards urban regions where it financed the expansion of the manufacturing and service sectors. A recent line of research studies the effects of climate change on labor and capital allocation across sectors and regions in Brazil.
Macroeconomic development: An emerging agenda
How can macroeconomics (and macroeconomists) contribute to what we know about development policy?
VoxDev Talk. The availability of better data has given fresh impetus to the use of macroeconomic models to explain the development process in LICs. In this episode of VoxDevTalks, Doug Gollin and Paula Bustos talk to Tim Phillips about this emerging agenda, what questions it is helping to answer, and the challenges of the next generation of research.
The Emerging Agenda for Macro Development
Recorded at the CEPR Paris Symposium, 8-13 December 2023.
Chair: Doug Gollin (Tufts University, University of Oxford, and CEPR)
Panellists:
Paula Bustos (ICREA, IPEG, UPF, and CEPR), Eliana La Ferrara (Harvard University and CEPR) and Rachel Ngai (Imperial College London, LSE, and CEPR)