Trade and investment in services are inhibited by a range of policy restrictions, but the best offers so far in the Doha negotiations are on average twice as restrictive as actual policy. They will generate no additional market opening. Regulatory concerns help explain the limited progress. This...

The Doha Round must be concluded not because it will produce dramatic liberalization but because it will create greater security of market access. Its conclusion would strengthen, symbolically and substantively, the WTO s valuable role in restraining protectionism in the current downturn. What...

This paper discusses what could be done to expand services trade and investment through a multilateral agreement in the World Trade Organization. A distinction is made between market access liberalization and the regulatory preconditions for benefiting from market opening. The authors argue that...

The competitiveness of firms in open economies is increasingly determined by access to low-cost and high-quality producer services - telecommunications, transport and distribution services, financial intermediation, etc. This paper discusses the role of services in economic growth, focusing in...

Decades of services trade negotiations have produced a plethora of rules and commitments but limited real liberalization. One reason is a form of "negotiating tunnel vision," which has led to a focus on reciprocal market opening rather than on creating the regulatory preconditions for...

In 2016, the Government of India proposed negotiations on an agreement to facilitate trade in services to complement the 2013 World Trade Organization Trade Facilitation Agreement in goods. The proposal did not find much support, but plurilateral talks launched in 2017 on various policy areas...

A new cross-country database on services policy reveals a perverse pattern: many landlocked countries restrict trade in the very services that connect them with the rest of the world. On average, telecommunications and air-transport policies are significantly more restrictive in landlocked...

The growth of India's manufacturing sector since 1991 has been attributed mostly to trade liberalization and more permissive industrial licensing. This paper demonstrates the significant impact of a neglected factor: India's policy reforms in services. The authors examine the link between those...

This paper estimates how changes in China's exchange rates would affect exports from competitor countries in third-country markets -- in other words, the "spillover effect." The authors use recent theory to develop an identification strategy, with a key role for the competition between China and...