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...

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...

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...

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...

Several major developments have necessitated a reimagining of the interface between national security and economic policy: geopolitical developments related to the rise of China and its relations with the United States; the shift from trade concerns over access to foreign markets toward concerns...