Much attention has been paid to the sharp fall in world trade associated with the economic crisis during the last quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009. Alarming forecasts have been published for the whole year of 2009 and several explanations have been offered. In particular, beyond the...

The brutal drop in global trade during the last quarter of 2008 and the first months of 2009 has been the subject of much discussion. Some have seen this fall-off, which was considerably steeper than the accompanying decline in production, as a reversal of previous trends. The international...

European integration is endangered by rising fears of sovereign default. Against this background, assessing the economic impacts attached to the Single Market is crucial to measuring the overall benefits provided by the European Union to its citizens. Over the last thirty years, substantial...

Trade elasticity is a crucial parameter in evaluating the welfare impacts of changes in trade frictions. The value of this parameter varies widely across product categories, however, which is especially important for developing countries' evaluation of the welfare gains from trade. We estimate,...

Global imports subject to pre-shipment inspections (PSI) - a practice under which imports need to undergo a third party review process before shipment - shrank from 700 bn USD in 2010 to 87 bn in 2018. However, only little is known about the trade impact of such procedures, which on the one hand...

Trade elasticity is a crucial parameter in evaluating the welfare impacts of changes in trade frictions. The value of this parameter varies widely across product categories, however, which is especially important for developing countries' evaluation of the welfare gains from trade. We estimate,...

This paper explores the economic impacts of preferential trade agreements, conditional on their level of ambition. We cluster 278 agreements, encompassing 910 provisions over 18 policy areas and estimate the trade elasticity for the different clusters. We then use these elasticities in a series...

Geography, economic size, or common history, help predicting signed regional trade agreements (RTAs). However, not all signed RTAs are "natural" according to economic determinants. En-dogeneity and general equilibrium effects of RTAS are the two mechanisms addressed in this paper. We estimate...