The trade collapse that followed the recent financial crisis has led to a renewed interest on the measurement issues affecting international merchandise trade statistics in the new globalized economy. The international fragmentation of industrial production blurs the concept of country of origin...

We estimate the effects of trade facilitation on the extensive margins of trade. Using OECD Trade Facilitation Indicators - which closely reflect the Trade Facilitation Agreement negotiated at the Bali WTO Ministerial Conference of December 2013 - we show that trade facilitation in a given...

This paper analyses to which extent domestic institutions affect trade flows. We use two complementary approaches, one focusing on the size of total trade flows and one focusing on bilateral trade patterns (gravity equation). Besides, we control for two other domestic policy variables: trade...

This paper presents a discussion of the potential channels through which international trade affects the position of low skilled workers in the European Union. After an analysis of the European Union's trade flows showing the predominant role of intra-industry trade with other industrialised...

It has become increasingly common to produce goods in a number of geographically dispersed stages linked by international trade. This tendency, known by names such as production fragmentation, processing trade, and vertical specialization, has important implications for the analysis of nontariff...

The status of public services is one of the most hotly debated issues surrounding the GATS. There are two approaches to distinguish such services from any other services: an institutional approach that focuses on the legal and institutional conditions governing supply (e.g. ownership status,...

Non-transparency is a term given in this paper to a set of government policies that increase the risk and uncertainty faced by economic actors foreign investors. This increase in risk and uncertainty stems from the presence of bribery and corruption, unstable economic policies, weak and poorly...

Using the influence-driven approach to endogenous trade-policy determination, we show how a free-trade agreement (FTA) with rules of origin can work as a device to compensate losers from trade liberalization. The FTA constructed in this paper is characterized by external tariff structures that...

Most existing commitments are confined to guaranteeing the levels of access that existed in the mid-1990s, when the Agreement entered into force, in a limited number of sectors. The only significant exceptions are the accession schedules of recent WTO Members and the negotiating results in two...

This paper is a literature survey of some relevant issues arising from environmental quality provision and eco-labelling schemes. First of all it is shown how the two topics are strictly related. Firms adopting a production process (or producing a good) more environmentally friendly than others...