At the same time as regional agreements to liberalize trade in services were being pursued by OECD countries, services were also introduced onto the agenda of a multilateral trade negotiation - the Uruguay Round. This paper focuses on the relationship between regional agreements and the draft...

Key questions in evaluating the justification for free trade agreements (FTAs) are whether formal international cooperation is necessary to promote greater contestability of markets through harmonization or recognition of regulatory regimes ("deep integration"), and whether any actions taken to...

Since the mid-1980s a substantial body of research has taken shape on trade in services. Much of this is inspired by the WTO or regional trade agreements, especially the EU. However, an increasing number of papers focus on the impacts of unilateral services sector liberalization. The literature...

This paper investigates Central America's external linkages over the last fifteen years of increased integration in light of the 2008-09 global recession. Using structural VAR models, it is found that a one percent shock to U.S. growth shifts economic activity in Central America by 0.7 to 1...

The paper argues that measuring revealed comparative advantages (RCA) in international trade in services cannot be straightforwardly compared to RCA in trade in goods. The essential difference is that services are internationally exchanged not only by cross-border trade mainly subject to...

This paper uses VAR models to examine the magnitude and sources of growth spillovers to the Baltics from key trading partners, as well asfrom the real effective exchange rate (REER). Our results show there are significant cross-country spillovers to the Baltics with those from the EU outweighing...

As the impact of trade in services on the current global financial crisis appears to overtake that of trade in goods, we propose to examine liberalization of trade in services through regional trade agreements (RTAs). The regional liberalization of trade in services is expected to generate...

Trade in services is a rapidly growing phenomenon. Consequently, the question of individual countries? competitiveness in trade in services is of increasing importance. In this paper we describe patterns of competitiveness in services sectors for EU members over the period 1995 to 2005,...

We estimate the potential for trade in services in a 2-step approach using a gravity model for a sample of bilateral service trade flows in individual service categories between 65 countries over the period 2000 to 2005. In particular, we focus on the Austrian economy's potential for untapped...

International posting of workers and mobility of self-employed service suppliers lie between outright migration and trade in goods: their regulation, for both distributional and marketcorrecting purposes, is not as difficult to harmonize as that of labour markets, but personal mobility is more...