The Service Trade Competitiveness Diagnostic (STDC) Toolkit is part of a larger agenda of trade competitiveness work developed by the World Bank’s International Trade Unit in recent years. Services are a key input in countries’ trade competitiveness, as well as a new source of trade...

The failure of trade economists to anticipate the extreme drop in trade post Lehman Brothers bankruptcy suggests that the behavior of trade in exceptional circumstances may still be poorly understood. This paper explores whether uncertainty shocks have explanatory power for movements in trade....

The failure of trade economists to anticipate the extreme drop in trade post-Lehman Brothers bankruptcy suggests that the behaviour of trade in exceptional circumstances may still be poorly understood. In this paper we explore whether uncertainty shocks have explanatory power for movements in...

The failure of trade economists to anticipate the extreme drop in trade post Lehman Brothers bankruptcy suggests that the behavior of trade in exceptional circumstances may still be poorly understood. This paper explores whether uncertainty shocks have explanatory power for movements in trade....

This paper analyzes whether and to what extent determinants of comparative advantage have explanatory power for conventional services trade. It assesses the geographical, Heckscher-Ohlin and institutional determinants of services trade based on the literature for goods trade. Moreover, this...

What determines services TFP growth: Is it services trade or services-trade regulation? To respond to this question I use four indicators of international trade in services since 1990 – namely FDI inward stock, services imports, domestic sales of foreign affiliates (FATS) and FDI inflows –...

Services providers are busy re-designing their strategies to cope with the global economic crisis. In order to take the right decisions, they need clarity and predictability on future market access in services. Meanwhile, consumers impoverished by the current crisis would greatly benefit from...

Tough times are expected in the year(s) to come, but focusing entirely on public and private budget cuts is not a politically sustainable policy. On top of its direct impoverishing impact, austerity has an indirect impact, which is very corrosive in the long run for consumers. It induces...

This paper uses a theoretically grounded model of international trade to estimate the cross-border tradability of services. The resulting indices cover up to 99 countries and ten sectors. The results show that information and communications technology capital and legal institutions are...