Since about a decade, we have seen a surge in interest as well as in the use of services preferentialism and unilateral services regulations. This paper provides an economic explanation of services regulation and services preferentialism, including their interaction. The paper derives hypotheses...

China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a mechanism through which countries can upgrade connectivity-related infrastructure, including through cross-border projects, complementing traditional sources of finance. An overarching goal of the BRI is to reduce trade costs between China and partner...

This paper attempts to quantify the impact of economic policy uncertainty on overall trade and trade linked to global value chains. Using new data on policy uncertainty for 18 countries and 24 years, it finds a statistically significant negative impact of policy uncertainty on overall trade...

I develop an index for economic integration accounting for its gradual and bilateral nature: the Gradual And Bilateral Integration (GABI) index. The graduality captures differences in the depth and path of five stages in economic integration and is an improvement over the use of binary dummy...

We explore the impact of multilateral liberalization, with emphasison distributional effects across countries. We first develop a realistic base1ine that takes into account events such as the entry of China into the WTO and the enlargement of the EU, allowing us to focus on those effects that...

Most of the large tariff reductions achieved in multilateral tradenegotiations have involved tariff-cutting formulas such as the Swissformula. However, wide variations in initial tariff rates between activeparticipants call for new approaches under the Doha Development Agenda.This paper surveys...

We develop a mixed complementarity programming (MCP) based estimating framework for non-tariff barriers (NTBs) to examine the evolution of market access conditions in the textile and clothing sectors, working with a panel of bilateral trade data on textile and clothing trade, underlying...

Despite the long relationship between the EU and the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP)countries aimed at encouraging their exports while stimulating growth and investment, the ACPstates still face difficulties in integrating into the world economy. This paper examines the non-leastdeveloped...

Because of concern that OECD tariff reductions will translate intoworsening export performance for the least developed countries, trade preferences haveproven a stumbling block to developing country support for multilateral liberalization.We examine the actual scope for preference erosion,...

The WTO has struggled with the treatment of nonmarket economies (NMEs). What was a nonissue in the original GATT (because of the homogeneity of participants) became quite an issue with the accession of formally centrally planned economies, which were not transformed to market economies, at least...