Liberalization of trade in services: A CGE analysis for Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay

In this paper we use two computable general equilibrium models to evaluate gains of liberalization of trade in services for Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. We employ two CGE models for the calculations. For the Argentine and Uruguayan cases, we apply a model built by the authors (see Chisari (2009)) based on the MPSGE. For Brazil, our study uses the GTAP model – adapted by Rutherford (2005) that also works on an MPSGE platform. We also consider two basic cases of liberalization of trade in services: 1) mobility of goods, in which there is mobility of services across borders, as it is the traditional case of exports and imports of goods, and 2) trade presence, that is location in the domestic country of new operators with a new technology for producing services. We estimate the gains from improvements in efficiency, quality and productivity of the industries of services, due to more intense competition in the domestic market as well as from reductions in the implicit mark up on domestic services due to barriers to trade. Quality advancements lead to gains in welfare of a similar order, or even higher than expected in the case of productivity improvements. To address the case of trade presence, a latent technology is defined in situ, operative or not depending on relative prices (its market share in the overall equilibrium of the economy is endogenous). This is especially relevant for the case of telecommunications. We also observe that: 1) the economy’s specific endowment of factors will limit the expected gains of the liberalization if the latent technology is unsuitable or incompatible with them, 2) governments can face some dilemmas regarding domestic market regulations, if the liberalization of trade in financial services called for a change in regulations so that the domestic demand for government bonds were to fall.