This paper presents evidence on the determinants of cross-border mergers and acquisitions in services sectors. It develops a stylized model of mergers and acquisitions that predicts that the incidence of merger and acquisition deals depends, inter alia, on the target economy's size, industrial...

Are changes in services markets provoking reform, restrictions, or inertia? To address this question, this paper draws on a new World Bank-World Trade Organization Services Trade Policy Database. The paper analyzes the services trade policies of 68 economies in 23 subsectors across five broad...

This paper describes the Services Trade Policy Database, a joint initiative by the World Bank and the World Trade Organization Secretariat, which builds on a database developed by the World Bank nearly 10 years ago and draws on a recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development...

A structural gravity model is used to estimate barriers to services trade across many sectors, countries, and time. Since the disaggregated output data needed to infer border barriers flexibly are often missing for services, this paper derives a novel methodology for projecting output data. The...

This paper examines how policy governing the liner shipping sector affects maritime transport costs and seaborne trade flows. The paper uses a novel data set and finds that restrictions, particularly on foreign investment, increase maritime transport costs, strongly but unevenly. The...

A new Services Trade Restrictions Database collects and makes publicly available information on services trade policy assembled in a comparable manner across 103 countries, five sectors (telecommunications, finance, transportation, retail and professional services) and the key modes of service...

Surprisingly little is known about policies that affect international trade in services. Previous analyses have focused on policy commitments made by countries in international agreements but these commitments do not in many cases reflect actual policy. This paper describes a new initiative to...

This paper proposes a measure of the extent to which a financial sector is connected to the real economy. The Measure of Connectedness is a measure of the composition of assets, namely the share of credit to the non-financial sectors over the total credit market instruments. The aggregate...

The majority of services trade is currently transacted under the terms of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) with increasingly ambitious provisions on crossborder trade and investment in services. This paper exploits novel and detailed information on the architecture and depth of services PTAs...

Through its diverse trade preference schemes, the European Union provides different groups of developing countries with different degrees of market access. This paper is the first to demonstrate empirically that such staggered market access induces sizable trade diversion to the detriment of...