This paper quantifies the economic implications of reducing barriers to services trade in the context of the Trade in International Services Agreement (TISA) using an extension of the GTAP model which incorporates a dynamic mechanism, a MONASH-style investment function, and disaggregated...

Investor-state dispute settlement provisions in modern trade agreements allow companies to bring suit against governments for policy changes that reduce the value of their investments, which include by definition expected profits. While these treaties also provide that the mere fact that a...

This brief examines the framing of the proposed reforms to the Investment Canada Act in the context of the digital transformation and the evolving nature of the contemporary innovation-intensive economy. It argues that the Act must go beyond considerations of the size of firms in triggering...

The emerging data-driven economy (DDE) promises to intensify the distributional issues that have contributed to disruptive political change in recent years. This raises the question of whether there a solution space in this economy that allows markets to clear and societies to maintain...

The consensus economic policy framework that evolved in the post-Bretton Woods era and the model of globalization to which it gave rise are in crisis due to political blowback. The framework has guided the system into a solution space that features stagnant growth and persistent deflationary...

This paper addresses the issue of how developing economies acquire new capabilities and the role of industrial policy in facilitating the technology acquisition that underpins these new capabilities. We focus on the role of the firm as aggregator of production technologies, business methods,...

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) promises to have a modest impact on Canada, according to ground breaking research from the C.D. Howe Institute. In “Better in than Out? Canada and the Trans-Pacific Partnership,” authors Dan Ciuriak, Ali Dadkhah, and Jingliang Xiao, find that some sectors...

Ethiopia is in the midst of a sustained growth surge that is becoming increasingly broad-based, building on major improvements in educational attainment, improved health outcomes, and infrastructure capacity in terms of access to power, transportation and telecommunications. The Government's...

When national competitiveness is invoked as a policy objective, trade experts have learned to retort that countries don`t trade, firms do. This focus on the importance of the firm in international trade is consistent with the most recent developments in trade theory, but policy needs to catch...

“Government-to-government” relations, underpinned by high-level Canadian representation in foreign nations, such as an embassy, significantly boost the level of Canadian exports to those countries, according to a new C. D. Howe Institute report. In the study, entitled “The Impact of...