In a world with increasingly integrated global supply chains, trade policy targeting upstream products has unintended consequences on their downstream industries. In this paper, we examine whether protection granted to intermediate manufacturers leads to petition for protection by their...

We exploit a natural experiment to study the extent to which popular attitudes toward trade are driven by economic fundamentals. In 2007, Costa Rica put a free trade agreement (FTA) to a national referendum. With a single question on the ballot, 59% of Costa Rican adult citizens cast a vote on...

Im Zeitraum 2009 bis 2011 waren rd. 1,3 Mio. Unternehmen aus Deutschland, zu 99 % KMU, international aktiv. Damit besaßen rund 37 % aller Unternehmen direkte Auslandskontakte (bei Berücksichtigung indirekter Kontaktformen: 44 %). Am häufigsten unterhielten die Unternehmen Im- und...

Services are an important part of global economic activity and of international trade. Nevertheless, compared to its very large tourism sector, the sector of high-end business services in Thailand remains small. As IT and information, and professional services are traded indirectly through value...

The rapid acceleration of digital transformation has had profound implications for services trade but the benefits of digitalisation risk being derailed by existing and emerging trade barriers. The OECD Digital Services Trade Restrictiveness Index (Digital STRI) is a new tool that identifies,...

While services account for almost 80% of GDP in the United States and a growing share of global trade, regulatory barriers to services trade around the world are still high. Using a hypothetical liberalisation scenario, this paper assesses the potential reduction of trade costs that could be...

Many different approaches have developed for the evaluation of non-tariff measures (NTMs) and free trade agreements (FTAs). Moving on from models using simple dummy variables, today a range of databases can capture different aspects of NTMs and FTAs. Some assess the depth of FTAs by extracting...

Starting in the 1960s with the Kennedy Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), nontariff measures (NTMs) have been replacing tariffs continuously as the core element of trade negotiations. Today they take centre stage in all EU trade agreements with industrialised and...

This paper presents new estimates of policy-induced trade costs in five services sectors for 46 countries. Results demonstrate the significant untapped economic potential of multilateral, plurilateral, and unilateral services trade liberalisation. Even though services trade has more than tripled...

A country or firm's position in the value chain will largely depend on its comparative advantage, and therefore the mix of skills and resource endowments it brings to international production. For some, this might initially involve specialising in the labour intensive segments while others may...