The computable general equilibrium model has become the workhorse tool for assessing the impacts of bilateral trade liberalization. This paper draws on recent experience within Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada in modeling the impacts of potential free trade agreements with various...

This paper studies the role of reduced barriers to international trade from two dimensions: (i) the implementation of Free Trade Agreements and (ii) declining "border effects". Our empirical estimates suggest that diminished border effects accounts for the bulk of the increase in international...

Trade in services is often hampered by domestic administrative barriers, even when countries are members of the same regional trade agreement. We exploit a large reform in the European Union (the EU Service Directive) aimed at reducing such administrative hurdles in cross-border service...

International trade in manufacturing goods has risen strongly over the past decades, contributing to the expansion of global value chains (GVCs). This paper studies how two factors contributed to this rise since 1970: (i) declining "border effects" that are arguably related to the ICT revolution...

The consensus back in 2008 – ten years after the introduction of the euro – was that the adoption of a common currency had made a limited impact of around 2% in total on the trade flows of the first wave of euro area countries (Baldwin et al., 2008). Since then, six more countries have...

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...

Geoeconomic concepts are gaining importance in EU trade policy. In this context new trade policy instruments are designed to protect the internal market against unfair trade practices, coercive actions as well as to ensure sustainable supply chains and the protection of human rights. The study...

This paper investigates the source of bilateral trade imbalance at industry level. We build a simple model based on gravity theory and derive the prediction that the bilateral trade balance in an industry is increasing in the difference between trading partners in the output share of the...

Short run gravity is a geometric weighted average of long run gravity and bilateral capacity. The model features (i) joint trade costs endogenous to bilateral volumes, (ii) long run gravity as a limiting case of efficient investment in bilateral capacities, (iii) a structural ratio of short run...

Short run gravity is a geometric weighted average of long run gravity and bilateral capacity. The model features (i) joint trade costs endogenous to bilateral volumes, (ii) long run gravity as a limiting case of effcient investment in bilateral capacities, (iii) a structural ratio of short run...