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...

The failure to advance the multilateral trade negotiations of the World Trade Organization (WTO) was a disruption for the international trading system. Alternatively, many countries have commenced to establish bilateral and regional Free Trade Agreements (FTA). Among those agreements the...

Given the debate about the advantages and disadvantages of free trade in development countries, this document analyses the importance of bilateral and multilateral agreements on Bolivia's trade between 1992 and 2009. For this purpose, a pooled model and panel data for the gravity equation of...

This study is a section from the Sustainability Impact Assessment (SIA), commissioned by the European Commission, on the impacts of the Investment Chapter in the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA). The Investment Chapter in CETA could encourage economic benefits...

Recent literature on the workhorse model of intra-industry trade has explored heterogeneous cost structures at the firm level. These approaches have proven to add realism and predictive power. This paper presents a new and simple heterogeneous-firms specification. We develop a symmetric...

This paper characterizes the current SACU tariff structure, considers its rationale, proposes and evaluates some alternatives and offers some suggestions for reforming the SACU revenue sharing formula and regional trade strategy. While considerable progress was made until recently in...

With an increasing number of Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) covering trade in services, we explore the impact of PTAs on services trade. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper in this literature that endogenizes the impact of preferentialism in estimating the trade effect....

This paper develops a method to measure difficulties in market access over a large set of countries (both developing and developed) and industries, during the period 1980-2006. We use a micro-founded heterogeneous-consumers model to estimate the impact of national borders on global and regional...

Commissioned by the European Commission, the Final Report for the EU-Canada Sustainability Impact Assessment (SIA) on the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) provides a comprehensive assessment of the potential impacts of trade liberalisation under CETA. The analysis...

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...