The Trump Administration is proceeding with unilateral measures to address what it has characterized as “unfair” trade, risking retaliation, but banking on a threat of massive escalation to extract a favorable outcome for itself. Notwithstanding widespread speculation that the threats to...

The outbreak in 2018 of a rapidly escalating trade war between the United States and China is a watershed event that is reshaping the global economic and political order. The main complaints made by the United States against China, while increasingly widely accepted and repeated, do not...

This study quantifies the trade and economic impacts of the tariff measures taken to date in the main salvoes of the trade wars unleashed by unilateral US tariff measures imposed on steel and aluminum pursuant to the Department of Commerce Section 232 National Security Investigation, on imports...

This paper analyzes the impact on Canada’s economy of Taiwan’s accession to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement. While the TPP is to be concluded by the twelve current negotiating parties, it will allow accession by other regional economies, consistent with APEC’s endorsement of...

For apparently irreconcilable domestic political reasons, the United States is an outlier amongst economically advanced countries as the only one that does not have a value added tax (VAT), which is the conventional and WTO-sanctioned approach to applying an economically efficient and...

This note discusses the scale of the risks to bilateral UK-EU trade under alternative scenarios for the UK leaving the Union, including a hard Brexit, a soft EFTA-like Brefta, and the scope for the foregone UK-EU trade to be made up through alternative agreements. It comments on the risks to...

This note develops four alternative estimates of the trade-related impacts of the United Kingdom seceding from the European Union. We contrast two basic scenarios: an exit that re-sets the UK's relationship with the rest of the EU to a WTO-rules most favoured nation basis (“Brexit”), versus...

This paper develops a new version of the GTAP database in which Canada is replaced by its provinces in order to allow the analysis of international trade agreements at a subnational level. The methodology in effect treats the individual provinces as separate trading entities, much like the...

This paper analyzes the impact on the U.S. economy of Taiwan's accession to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement. While the TPP is to be concluded by the twelve current negotiating parties, other regional economies will be able to join, consistent with APEC's endorsement of the TPP as a...

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...