This study empirically investigates key restrictions to the internationalisation of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in manufacturing and across different types of services. The study explores the extent to which binding constraints faced by SMEs producing goods may differ from small...

Countries embarking on trade negotiations are not only seeking increased market access, but also, reduced market opacity. This study distils the most progressive practices for promoting regulatory transparency in over one hundred regional trade agreements (RTAs) concluded by OECD and large...

Taking global value chains (GVCs) into account has important implications for trade policy. When production is vertically fragmented and trade in intermediate inputs is prevalent, one has to look differently at a certain number of issues. Through case studies, this paper provides new evidence on...

Over the past decade, an increasing number of economies have resorted to regional trade agreements (RTAs) as a means to further the market-opening and rule-making agenda. In this context, this paper addresses the question as to whether and how selected elements of RTAs could be used as...

What influences the adoption of transparency obligations in trade agreements, and what are its effects? This paper uses a new dataset on transparency provisions in over a hundred regional trade agreements (RTAs) to provide empirical evidence of the political economy determinants of international...

This paper presents the services trade restrictiveness indices (STRIs) for financial services. The STRIs are composite indices taking values between zero and one, zero representing an open market and one a market completely closed to foreign services providers. The indices are calculated for 40...

This paper uses newly released OECD data on services trade restrictions (STRI) to analyse the relationship between services trade restrictions, cross-border trade in services and trade in downstream manufactured goods. A standard gravity model is enhanced by the STRI indices in a cross-section...

Regional trade agreements (RTAs) present opportunities for controlling technical barriers to trade (TBTs). Using key principles and provisions of the WTO Agreement on TBT as a yardstick for analysis, this paper examines whether and how eight major regional integration agreements within the...