Digital transformation has enabled easier tradability of traditional services across borders and the emergence of new services that create value from data. But the benefits derived from digitalisation risk being derailed by existing and emerging trade barriers. The OECD Digital Services Trade...

The debate about whether or not to extend the WTO Moratorium on imposing customs duties on electronic transmissions has, to date, narrowly focused on its potential customs revenue implications. This paper sets out to broaden and deepen this debate. First, by putting current estimates of the...

Whether gains from trade are equally distributed within countries is the subject of a lively debate. This paper presents a novel framework to analyse the distributional effects of trade policy by linking the OECD’s CGE trade model, METRO, with consumption expenditure data from household budget...

Recent years have witnessed an ever-increasing resort to export restrictions in the markets for raw materials, causing heightened uncertainty about supply availability together with friction among trading partners. Poor transparency can amplify and compound the effects of restrictive trade...

The incidence of export taxes, prohibitions and other measures that raise export prices, limit export quantities or place conditions on exporting is on the rise. Transparency can help mitigate the negative effects of export restrictions by enabling affected stakeholders to better understand and...

This report assesses how specific border procedures impact on the operation of supply chains and the resulting policy implications, using data from the OECD Trade Facilitation Indicators (TFIs) database and from the OECD-WTO database on trade-in-value-added. The assessment focusses on the impact...

The water in the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) refers to the difference between the bound level of trade restrictiveness permitted by the GATS and the actual trade regime. Using the OECD Services Trade Restrictiveness Index (STRI), this report provides estimates of the water in...

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...

The digital transformation has had a profound impact on international trade, lowering barriers to internationalisation and contributing to growing trade competitiveness, but at the same time making international trade transactions more complex. Distinctions between goods and services and between...

The ubiquitous exchange of data across borders has given rise to a range of concerns by governments and citizens about some of the effects of so much information being collected and used, often without the knowledge of data subjects. This has led countries to condition or prohibit the transfer...