We study the effect of services trade restrictiveness on manufacturing productivity for a broad cross-section of countries at different stages of economic development. Decreasing services trade restrictiveness has a positive indirect impact on the manufacturing sectors that use services as...

The paper investigates the relationship between services trade performance and employment characteristics in Italian firms. Our analysis is at the micro level and descriptive in nature. We merge micro data on services trade transactions with employment and wage variables at the level of the...

Many agreements to liberalize trade in services tend to be limited in scope. Concerns about possible negative regulatory consequences of services liberalization is one reason for this. In this paper we provide quantitative estimates of the impact of governance quality on the magnitude of the...

Trade in financial services is integrated through Economic Integration Agreements (EIAs), in addition to the multilateral trading system developed under the WTO. Securities' clearing and settlement services have nowadays become more important than ever. The latter have gained enormous strategic...

This paper examines whether restrictive data policies impact trade in services over the internet. We have collected comparable information on a variety of policy measures that regulate data for a wide group of countries for the years 2006-2016. This information is compiled in a weighted index...

This paper analyses 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 61 countries over the period 2000-2011 and, on the other hand, on...

Services are regulated for a variety of reasons. Regulation is typically influenced by political economy forces and may thus at times reflect protectionist motivations. Similar considerations arise for goods, but the potential for protectionist capture may be greater in services as many sectors...

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...

This paper provides the first quantitative evidence on the restrictiveness of services policies in 2016 for a sample of developing countries, based on recently released regulatory data collected by the World Bank and WTO. We use machine learning to recreate to a high degree of accuracy the...

Existing research generally finds weak positive effects of aid for trade (AfT) on aggregate merchandise trade of recipients once endogeneity in the AfT-trade relationship is accounted for. In this paper, we confirm weak findings for both aggregate merchandise and services trade of recipients,...