This dissertation takes the readers through three stories that illustrate how global macro shocks and trade policies can have an extensive impact on emerging countries across worker, firm, and household-level. Building on this general theme, I offer an empirical investigation on two labor-abundant regions that utilize different economic leverages for their development. The first chapter visits Vietnam, a fast growing developing country in Southeast Asia that has the Factory Asia model embedded in its development agenda. With the U.S-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA) signed in 2001, the country has gained a strong foothold into the U.S goods market and impressively exported itself out of poverty over the last three decades. Using this exogenous trade shock, I provide a novel channel of the gains from the BTA that are spatially propagated across the local labor markets through the pre-existing internal migration network. I provide a theory, and devise an empirical counterpart to argue for an important contribution of the migration-induced spillover effect from the BTA shock in (i) facilitating the structural transformation away from agriculture and toward industrialization, (ii) improving earnings among the low-educated workers, and (iii) narrowing the skill premium. Importantly, the direct effect of trade on labor reallocation nearly doubles when controlling for the spillover exposure. Further analysis on household spending and regional poverty shows that both direct and spillover exposures improve per capita expenditure for households with low educated head and effectively reduce poverty incidence, albeit with some differential timing over the short and medium run. In particular, while the direct effect reduces regional poverty immediately after the BTA implementation and quickly subsides in the subsequent years, the spillover effect gradually builds up over time and only turns significant by 2008. The second chapter, while still remaining on Vietnam, visits a more recent episode of trade protectionism that has garnered a great deal of attention from both the media and academia. Due to the interconnected global production network, a trade dispute between a few economic giants could extend its impacts on other countries in the supply chain. For developing countries, this can be either a curse or a blessing. In this chapter, coauthored with Sunghun Lim, we leverage a wide range of Vietnamese dataset and the 2018-2019 US-China trade war to show that protectionist trade policies can inadvertently create unexpected economic benefits for a bystander developing nation. We uncover a significant increase in Vietnam’s exports to the US through the channel of trade diversion opportunities arising from the trade conflict. We also find that new FDI projects in the manufacturing sectors hit by the trade war have increased by about 30% compared to other FDI destinations amid the trade war. More importantly, our analysis reveals that such unforeseen exposure to the trade war triggered significant structural transformation in Vietnam, manifested in (i) increased formality and skill upgrades at the firm level, (ii) mitigated labor market frictions through reallocation of high-skilled workers, and (iii) a labor shift from agriculture to manufacturing and informal to formal sectors in the regions more impacted by the trade war. This study highlights that the pathway toward economic growth remains open for developing economies in the era of trade protectionism, at least in the short run. The final chapter travels to a labor-abundant and resource-rich Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Instead of pursuing an export led growth through light manufacturing, due to a large deposit of natural resources and precious minerals, it is the mineral extraction sector that dominates the region’s export portfolio. This chapter, coauthored with Tsenguunjav Byambasuren, explores the role of the understudied artisanal mining sector on employment outcomes among African women. We then asks how such improvement in outside option would affect household-level outcomes such as intimate partner violence (IPV) and decision-making power. Exploiting cell-level spatial variation in gold suitability and an exogenous variation in international gold price for identification, we find that moderately severe physical IPV that are experienced less frequently by women decreases mainly due to improvement in women’s bargaining power enhanced by an increase in their earning potential from extractive and sales or retail activities relative to husbands in response to the increased profitability of artisanal mining. The IPV-reducing short-run effects of artisanal gold mining, which are opposite from the impacts of industrial gold mining, tend to persist in the long term as its driving forces sustain over time. However, sexual IPV generally increases due to artisanal and industrial gold mining.