This paper challenges the conventional academic view that international outsourcing is just another form of gainful trade. Contrary to this view, we show that labor-service outsourcing can reduce the high-wage country's welfare even when product-market trade is beneficial, within a model that...

Previous analyses showed that product market deregulation often precedes labor market (LM) reforms. This paper introduces LM imperfections within an economic geography framework, the level of optimal LM regulation being based on each country's social preferences. Due to capital mobility, opening...

The article summarises the main lessons of the Bank’s 2010 conference which focused on international trade and foreign direct investment. The research is based on a microeconomic approach to the behaviour of Belgian firms, with reference to developments in the scientific literature on the...

The past several years have been tumultuous ones for U.S. trade policy. After strident rhetoric from Donald Trump during his presidential campaign, his administration followed up with a wide range of aggressive actions. Congress, U.S. trading partners, businesses, and consumers have all been...

While the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement has received far more attention, a lesser-known U.S. trade deal has also been reworked. In April of 2017, President Trump proclaimed his displeasure with the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (commonly referred to as “KORUS”),...

This paper introduces finance or credit in the Dixit-Stiglitz-Krugman (DSK) model of international trade. It identifies mechanisms by which finance can affect the main results of the conventional model. The key results are as follows. Perfect credit market does not affect number of varieties or...

This paper studies two major stages of European integration, the expansion of the European Union (EU) in 2004 and the Schengen Area in 2008, and their impacts on economic performance in subregions of Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. Using European regional data at the NUTS3 level...

In this paper, I estimate the impact of service offshoring on the real wages of U.S. workers by controlling for workers’ skill levels and the offshoring susceptibility of different tasks. Matching individual-level wage data with input-output tables over the period from 2006 to 2009, I am...

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) aspires to become a state-of-the-art trade agreement linking 12 countries on both sides of the Pacific. In addition to establishing a free trade agreement (FTA) among these countries, negotiators are pursuing a long list of other issues, both trade-related and...

This paper challenges the conventional academic view that international outsourcing is just another form of gainful trade. Contrary to that view, we show that labourservice outsourcing can reduce the highwage country's welfare even when productmarket trade is beneficial, within a model that...