This study assesses the potential gains from unilateral trade liberalization for the UK, against the background of a hard Brexit in which a hard border and tariff wall is erected between the UK and the European Union. Unilateral trade liberalization would allow the UK to expeditiously offset at...

The dawn of a new economic era based on a new essential capital asset and new general purpose technologies provides a unifying framework to make sense of the rupture of the rules-based trading system, the flaring conflicts within states, and the eruption of a trade and technology war between...

In these notes, I comment on the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between Canada and the European Union, on its economics, and on its importance for the rules-based multilateral trading system at a time of disruptive change

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...

The Trump administration's swift exit from the TPP has clearly not killed the deal as the remaining signatories consider whether to move ahead without the United States. While the overall impact of the deal would be lower without the U.S., the 11 remaining countries are better off with a TPP11...

This study applies a multi-country partial equilibrium model to assess the impact of tariff elimination on Canadian canola products by the European Union, and compares the composition of Canadian canola product exports to the EU, which practices tariff escalation, to exports to the United...

This note develops four alternative estimates of the trade-related impacts of the United Kingdom seceding from the European Union. We contrast two basic scenarios: an exit that re-sets the UK's relationship with the rest of the EU to a WTO-rules most favoured nation basis (“Brexit”), versus...

We assess the outcomes for the negotiating parties in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) if the TPP11 go ahead with the agreement as negotiated without the United States, as compared to the outcomes under the TPP12 agreement as signed in October 2016. Both the TPP11 and TPP12 are assessed on...

The consensus economic policy framework that evolved in the post-Bretton Woods era and the model of globalization to which it gave rise are in crisis due to political blowback. The framework has guided the system into a solution space that features stagnant growth and persistent deflationary...

This note seeks to shed light on how economies develop by reconciling the apparent conflict between diversification and specialization as the path to development, and alternative conceptions of an economy as an equilibrium system of optimizing agents versus a driven system dependent on...