It is well established in theory that trade liberalization impacts on productivity through the reallocation of market share to more productive firms. Since more productive firms tend to pay higher wages, the market reallocation effect also increases average wages. In addition to these...

Estimates for ad valorem tariff equivalents of services trade restrictions for cross-border trade in six services sectors are presented in this paper. These equivalents are found to be very big in several service sectors with estimates ranging as high as 2000% when trade flows are relatively...

This report presents evidence on how services trade restrictions influence the decisions and performance of firms engaged in international markets, drawing on micro-data from Belgium, Finland, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It first describes the...

While services account for almost 80% of GDP in the United States and a growing share of global trade, regulatory barriers to services trade around the world are still high. Using a hypothetical liberalisation scenario, this paper assesses the potential reduction of trade costs that could be...

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play an important role in generating economic activity and employment in developing and developed countries. However, partly due to remaining at-the-border trade costs, SMEs continue to be less represented in international trade – as direct exporters...

This paper presents new estimates of policy-induced trade costs in five services sectors for 46 countries. Results demonstrate the significant untapped economic potential of multilateral, plurilateral, and unilateral services trade liberalisation. Even though services trade has more than tripled...

Starting in the 1960s with the Kennedy Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), nontariff measures (NTMs) have been replacing tariffs continuously as the core element of trade negotiations. Today they take centre stage in all EU trade agreements with industrialised and...

Trade facilitation measures are key in offsetting some of the time and cost increases experienced by firms and consumers against a backdrop of continued supply chain disruptions. Through the lens of the updated OECD Trade Facilitation Indicators (TFIs), this paper assesses progress and...

We formalize the GATT/WTO principle of reciprocity in workhorse quantitative trade models, characterizing reciprocal tariff cuts that hold terms of trade fixed and investigating their labor-market impacts. We provide closed-form expressions mapping reciprocal tariff cuts to labor market...

In order to ensure transparency and to keep abreast of trade policies in support of sustainability, the WTO Committee on Trade and Environment (CTE) mandated the WTO Secretariat to compile and collate all environment-related measures notified to WTO. The database also includes...