Europe’s market for services is fragmented by many regulatory barriers. The Services directive proposed by the European Commission aims to integrate national services markets by reducing these barriers. Several studies indicate that bilateral trade and foreign direct investment in services...

This paper utilizes new Dutch transaction-level data on international trade to investigate the microeconomic patterns of Dutch exports. First, we show that self-selection based on ex-ante productivity drives firms' export decisions, which we subsequently relate to various sources of fixed...

Our contribution uses trade in value added statistics to assess the causes of the recent world trade slowdown. We conclude that world trade elasticity has fallen due to a combination of regional and cyclical changes during the economic crisis. A cyclical factor is the lower cumulative trade...

A Single Market for services in the European Union is not yet a reality. The European Commission launched proposals that would remove some negative trade impacts caused by national regulation differences. We apply a general equilibrium model (WorldScan) to assess what economic benefits the...

International trade in services is hampered by non-tariff barriers that originate from national regulations. Not only the level of regulation in home or export country matters, but also the inter-country differences in regulation for service markets. Regulatory measures tend to affect fixed...

The Rome Treaty that forms the basis for the European Union (EU) states that goods, services, capital and labour can move freely between the member states. This paper empirically investigates the functioning of the European internal market for services, and especially the role played by the...