This chapter surveys empirically the broad features of trade policy in goods for 31 major economies that collectively represented 83% of the world's population and 91% of the world's GDP in 2013. We address five questions: Do some countries have more liberal trading regimes than others? Within...

We provide a synthesis of the theoretical models that study the use of escape clauses, also known as safeguards, in multilateral and preferential trade agreements. We consider models that explain this type of flexibility based on economic efficiency, political economy shocks, and...

While services account for almost 80% of GDP in the United States and a growing share of global trade, regulatory barriers to services trade around the world are still high. Using a hypothetical liberalisation scenario, this paper assesses the potential reduction of trade costs that could be...

This paper presents new estimates of policy-induced trade costs in five services sectors for 46 countries. Results demonstrate the significant untapped economic potential of multilateral, plurilateral, and unilateral services trade liberalisation. Even though services trade has more than tripled...

This report explores the relationship between services trade policies and mark-ups at the firm level, taken as a measure of competitive pressure. Restrictive regulations are found to enable firms to charge higher mark-ups in a majority of services sectors, suggesting ample scope for...

Estimates for ad valorem tariff equivalents of services trade restrictions for cross-border trade in six services sectors are presented in this paper. These equivalents are found to be very big in several service sectors with estimates ranging as high as 2000% when trade flows are relatively...

Ever since the early 20th century, Argentina has failed to fully reap the benefits that integrating into the world economy can offer. With exports and imports only accounting for less than 30% of GDP, Argentina is significantly less integrated into the world economy than other emerging market...

We formalize the GATT/WTO principle of reciprocity in workhorse quantitative trade models, characterizing reciprocal tariff cuts that hold terms of trade fixed and investigating their labor-market impacts. We provide closed-form expressions mapping reciprocal tariff cuts to labor market...

Die deutsch-russischen Wirtschaftsbeziehungen haben sich seit den 1990er Jahren fast unbemerkt von der (medialen) Öffentlichkeit positiv weiterentwickelt. Russland wurde zwar als G8-Mitglied und eines der wichtigen Schwellenländer der BRIC-Gruppe wahrgenommen, mehr Aufmerksamkeit genoss...

This paper presents the services trade restrictiveness indices (STRIs) for transport and courier 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...