We assess the outcomes for the negotiating parties in the Trans-Pacific Partnership if the remaining eleven parties go ahead with the agreement as negotiated without the United States, as compared to the outcomes under the original twelve-member agreement signed in October 2016. We find that the...

Canada is developing a progressive trade agenda (PTA) that is pitched as a response to the rise of anti-globalization populism. This note reviews the concept of the PTA, its motivation, the specific elements that comprise it, the likely efficacy of these measures in addressing the factors...

The adaptation of commercial frameworks to the digital environment has been underway for many years. Well-developed e-commerce regimes have already been developed in major regional trade agreements; the WTO is playing catch up - and it is imperative that it do so, both to make available the...

Historically, conflict between states has centered on valuable prizes – assets that generated economic rents: land in the agrarian era, trade routes and ports and resources in the industrial mercantile era, intellectual property in the knowledge-based economy era, and now data in the...

This note considers the nature of the cybersecurity concerns that have been raised in the decoupling debate and their implications for national security, contrasts those with the nature of the national security concerns that have traditionally been included in the rules-based trade framework,...

With an increasing share of global commerce taking place in digital form or facilitated by digital platforms, it is becoming increasingly important to update the rules-based framework to accommodate and enable the development of the intangibles-based data-driven economy while reconciling the...

This report reviews Canada’s progressive trade agenda (PTA), situates it in a broader global context of policies addressing the distributional and sustainability issues raised by international trade and investment, and outlines enhancements to the standard general equilibrium modelling toolkit...

The pandemic-triggered economic crisis has served to merge, amplify and accelerate changes driven by the anti-globalization movement, the US trade and technology war on China, the digital transformation, and the Anthropocene. Existing business models that might have been able to withstand...

In the modern data-driven economy, trade secrets are becoming a more important part of firms’ intellectual property strategies. For their part, governments worldwide have been introducing new legislation to broaden and toughen the protection for trade secrets citing estimates of the cost of...