This paper draws from different approaches within the field of international political economy to try to explain why governments undertook different levels of market access commitments under the WTO's General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). The argument, which is supported by empirical...

This paper attempts to fill a gap in the trade literature by providing a comprehensive overview of services liberalization commitments in the new generation of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) as compared to prevailing GATS commitments and Doha Round offers. By developing a new database, the...

This paper analyses the possible gains from regional and multilateral liberalization of financial services trade for African countries taking into account the implications of such liberalization for financial regulation and capital account liberalization. It also describes existing efforts to...

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) on services have proliferated since 2000. This working paper briefly presents the expansion of the dataset initially developed in Marchetti and Roy (2008). The data permits to assess the extent to which market access commitments undertaken by WTO Members in...

Using SPS measures obtained from the SPS Information Management System of the WTO and controlling for zero trade flows, we find that SPS concerns reduce the probability of trade in agricultural and food products consistently. However, the amount of trade is positively affected by SPS measures...

Issues related to small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) supplying services have been raised at earlier stages of the Doha Round in various negotiating contexts and, more recently, at meetings of the Council for Trade in Services. It is difficult, however, to find a common denominator as to...

This paper studies the effects of trade policy uncertainty on the extensive and the intensive margins of trade for a sample of 149 exporters at the HS6 digit level. We measure trade policy uncertainty as the gap between binding tariff commitments under trade agreements (multilateral and regional...

In 2003, the WTO General Council decided to provide an additional legal pathway for WTO Members with insufficient or no manufacturing capacities in the pharmaceutical sector to access medicines. Two years later, in 2005, WTO Members unanimously agreed to give this mechanism, often referred to as...

While greater focus has been cast on analysis of policy changes affecting trade in goods in the aftermath of the financial crisis, little is known about the direction of policies affecting trade in services. On the basis of information contained in the I-TIP Services database, this paper...