China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a mechanism through which countries can upgrade connectivity-related infrastructure, including through cross-border projects, complementing traditional sources of finance. An overarching goal of the BRI is to reduce trade costs between China and partner...

Since about a decade, we have seen a surge in interest as well as in the use of services preferentialism and unilateral services regulations. This paper provides an economic explanation of services regulation and services preferentialism, including their interaction. The paper derives hypotheses...

This paper attempts to quantify the impact of economic policy uncertainty on overall trade and trade linked to global value chains. Using new data on policy uncertainty for 18 countries and 24 years, it finds a statistically significant negative impact of policy uncertainty on overall trade...

Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) have become deeper over time, often encompassing a set of disciplines that go beyond traditional trade policy such as investment, competition, and intellectual property rights protection. In the policy and theory literature, a prominent argument why countries...

The post Second World War liberal trade order has been a driver of global economic growth and rising average per capita incomes. This order confronts increasing opposition, reflecting concerns about adjustment costs and distributional effects of globalization, and the ability to pursue national...

This paper presents a legal-economic analysis of the Appellate Body's decision that the WTO's Anti-Dumping Agreement (ADA) precludes countries from taking into account government-created price distortions of major inputs when calculating anti-dumping duties, made in EU-Biodiesel (Argentina). In...

We study the role of firms in the political economy of trade agreements. Using detailed information from lobbying reports filed under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, we find that virtually all firms that lobby on free trade agreements (FTAs) support their ratification. Moreover, relative to...

This paper analyses the relationship between regional trade integration and trade costs in services industries. The empirical analysis relies, on the one hand, on a dataset of theory-consistent bilateral trade costs calculated for 61 countries over the period 2000-2011 and, on the other hand, on...

The WTO has struggled with the treatment of nonmarket economies (NMEs). What was a nonissue in the original GATT (because of the homogeneity of participants) became quite an issue with the accession of formally centrally planned economies, which were not transformed to market economies, at least...

The Agreement on Trade Facilitation (TFA) embodies the first set of new multilateral rules to have been negotiated under auspices of the WTO since the launch of the Doha Development Agenda, part of a small package of decisions centering on matters of interest to developing countries that was...