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...

The way in which public policy is developed is highly particular to the context - the political and institutional framework of the country, the subject area, and the key issues and events of the day. Canadian trade policy formation is no exception, being very much shaped by its context - the...

The election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States raises a litany of questions about the future of US trade policy. Canada, along with Mexico, is particularly heavily exposed to trade with the United States and there is considerable speculation about how Canada should react if...

The Trump Administration has pursued a sharply different – and for its trade partners unsettling – trade policy from that followed by the United States in the postwar period. While much attention has been focussed on the oftentimes contradictory, oftentimes theoretically unfounded, and...

The new “U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement” (USMCA) signed on 1 October 2018 sets out important markers concerning the future direction of Trump Administration trade policy. As consideration turns to the path to success in implementing this agreement, I will focus in my remarks today on what...

New trade rules being implemented as part of the on-going wave of major bilateral/regional trade agreements are impacting the complex and evolving innovation ecosystem in non-neutral ways, favouring some innovation modes (such as patent-oriented research and development), but generating...

It is a cliché to say that the pace of change has accelerated. But the pace of change since the middle of the 1990s has been phenomenal. Somewhere in the mid-1990s, the world economy (and its political economy) seems to have taken a blind curve and started down an uncharted road, leaving...

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...