Abstract This paper analyzes the relationship between regional trade integration and trade costs in services industries. The empirical analysis relies, on the one hand, on a dataset of theory-consistent bilateral trade costs calculated for 55 countries over the period 1999-2009 and, on the other...

Regulatory measures constitute a significant barrier to cross-border services trade in sectors including transport, communications, business services, insurance, and recreation. However, regulation has weaker effects on trade in financial services, distribution, and construction. Entry barriers...

This paper evaluates whether the proposed FTAAP is a desirable policy option for APEC member economies and the world economy. More specifically, this paper quantitatively investigates whether the FTAAP satisfies conditions for a trade bloc to generate positive and sufficient net trade creation...

This paper takes stock of the forces that lie behind the recent rise of preferential agreements in services trade. Its initial focus is with a number of distinguishing features of services trade that sets it apart from trade in goods and shapes trade liberalization and rule-making approaches in...

This paper paints the first empirical portrait of services firms in the developing world. Compared with manufacturers, service providers are smaller, but growing faster. They are more productive, pay higher wages, and invest more heavily than manufacturers, but are less likely to export or to...

General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), one of the legal documents in the Appendix to the agreement that had established WTO, is the first multi-lateral agreement that defines and delineates the basic concepts, rules and principals of international trade in services. This paper discusses...

We present a new dataset of international trade costs in services sectors. Using a theory-based methodology combined with data on domestic shipments and cross-border trade, we find that trade costs in services are much higher than in goods sectors: a multiple of two to three times in many cases....

This paper argues that regulatory measures affect the fixed cost of entering a market as well as the variable costs of servicing that market. Moreover, differences in regulation among countries often imply that firms have to incur entry costs in every new market. Indicators of regulatory...

As the impact of trade in services on the current global financial crisis appears to overtake that of trade in goods, we propose to examine liberalization of trade in services through regional trade agreements (RTAs). The regional liberalization of trade in services is expected to generate...

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...