The Doha Round has laboured from the beginning. Trade agreements have commercial objectives but the Doha Round was launched as an international political response to 9/11; the technical groundwork had not been laid and the movement on the built-in agenda had been negligible. Coming out of Hong...

This note discusses the scale of the risks to bilateral UK-EU trade under alternative scenarios for the UK leaving the Union, including a hard Brexit, a soft EFTA-like Brefta, and the scope for the foregone UK-EU trade to be made up through alternative agreements. It comments on the risks to...

As the global community moves to forge a new climate change agreement, complex questions arise concerning the implications for the international trading system. This was the topic of a meeting in Toronto on October 26 and 27, 2009 that brought together experts from the two communities – trade...

This paper considers the implications of the shift of trade rule-making and liberalization from the World Trade Organization (WTO) to the mega-regional mode for the development of responses to climate change. We review developments at the interface between the trade system and climate change...

This paper develops a new version of the GTAP database in which Canada is replaced by its provinces in order to allow the analysis of international trade agreements at a subnational level. The methodology in effect treats the individual provinces as separate trading entities, much like the...

One criticism of the gravity model of international trade is that it takes no account of comparative advantage. This critique is particularly important when the gravity model is considered for policy applications such as identifying priority markets for trade promotion programs. For example, the...

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...

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...

This note seeks to shed light on how economies develop by reconciling the apparent conflict between diversification and specialization as the path to development, and alternative conceptions of an economy as an equilibrium system of optimizing agents versus a driven system dependent on...

Participation in the modern, globalized economy necessarily entails some degree of economy-level specialization in terms of the relative intensities of activities, since all economies – and especially developing ones – are small relative to the global economy. At the same time, it has been...