The digital transformation has had a profound impact on international trade, lowering barriers to internationalisation and contributing to growing trade competitiveness, but at the same time making international trade transactions more complex. Distinctions between goods and services and between...

The debate about whether or not to extend the WTO Moratorium on imposing customs duties on electronic transmissions has, to date, narrowly focused on its potential customs revenue implications. This paper sets out to broaden and deepen this debate. First, by putting current estimates of the...

Digital transformation has enabled easier tradability of traditional services across borders and the emergence of new services that create value from data. But the benefits derived from digitalisation risk being derailed by existing and emerging trade barriers. The OECD Digital Services Trade...

This paper presents new data on regulatory barriers affecting services trade within the European Economic Area (EEA), covering 25 EEA countries, 22 sectors and five years (2014-2018). Following the methodology of the OECD Services Trade Restrictiveness Index (STRI), qualitative information is...

Many regional trade agreements (RTAs) contain chapters and articles that are environmentally specific. However, Parties can elect to more broadly incorporate environmental objectives in their RTAs to address their environmental concerns in such agreements. This report investigates in what ways...

Ever since the early 20th century, Argentina has failed to fully reap the benefits that integrating into the world economy can offer. With exports and imports only accounting for less than 30% of GDP, Argentina is significantly less integrated into the world economy than other emerging market...

Global trade imbalances narrowed in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. They have remained at a lower level but are still of concern to policy makers because of the risks they pose to individual economies, as well as globally. However, the ultimate causes of these imbalances are not...

This paper presents descriptive evidence of specialisation trends and investigates empirically their causes and consequences, analysing the role of policies in this process. Then, based on the insights from the backward looking analysis, it draws global trade and specialisation scenarios up to...

Whether gains from trade are equally distributed within countries is the subject of a lively debate. This paper presents a novel framework to analyse the distributional effects of trade policy by linking the OECD’s CGE trade model, METRO, with consumption expenditure data from household budget...