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Published online: 17 February 2021 This paper analyses a prominent dimension of the initial policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic observed in many countries: the imposition of export restrictions and actions to facilitate imports. Using weekly data on the use of trade policy instruments during the first seven months of the COVID-19 pandemic (January–July, 2020), we assess the relationship between the use of trade policy instruments and attributes of pre-crisis public procurement regulation. Controlling for country size, government effectiveness and economic factors, we find that use of export restrictions targeting medical products is strongly positively correlated with the total number of steps and average time required to complete procurement processes in the pre-crisis period. Membership of trade agreements encompassing public procurement disciplines is associated with actions to facilitate trade in medical products. These findings suggest future empirical assessments of the drivers of trade policy during the pandemic should consider public procurement systems.

This article explores linkages between migration, international trade and investment from both economics and legal perspectives. The literature review reveals that the migration-investmenttrade triangle shows complex interdependencies, both in terms of substitution and complementarities, though its components remain largely separated both institutionally and legally. The 2018 Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration addresses a number of trade and investment-related issues. Recent treaty developments also encourage considering the three in a more integrated manner. The article suggests undertaking such an integration effort under the emerging principle of Common Concern of Humankind and sets out a number of preliminary ideas suggesting ways in which migration could be addressed in policies on international trade regulation and in the field of investment protection. Migration, trade, investment, Global Compact, Common Concern of Humankind

First published online: 19 August 2020 Controlling for endogeneity-induced biases and accounting for the source of heterogeneity may both matter for the proper empirical estimation of the effect of heterogeneous standards on trade. However, existing literature on the trade effects of heterogeneity in pesticides maximum residue levels (MRLs) does not directly address the problem of endogeneity in the standards-trade relationship. Using pesticides MRL data for 53 countries over 2005-14, we thus re-examine the trade effects of stricter (than partner) standards accounting for endogeneity using panel data methods. We find that the direction of the estimated trade effects gets reversed, thereby underlining the greater demand-enhancing effect of more stringent regulation. We also discuss why endogeneity may bias the estimates downwards. In another original contribution, we examine the standards-trade relationship by the direction of imposition of stricter standards for a large panel. Our results suggest that stricter standards do not impede trade, irrespective of who imposes them.

Published online: 17 February 2021 This paper presents new high-frequency data on trade policy changes targeting medical and food products since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, documenting how countries used trade policy instruments in response to the health crisis on a week-by-week basis. The data set reveals a rapid increase in trade policy activism in February and March 2020 in tandem with the rise in COVID-19 cases but also uncovers extensive heterogeneity across countries in both their use of trade policy and the types of measures used. Some countries acted to restrict exports and facilitate imports, others targeted only one of these margins, and many did not use trade policy at all. The observed heterogeneity suggests numerous research questions on the drivers of trade policy responses to COVID-19, on the effects of these measures on trade and prices of critical products, and on the role of trade agreements in influencing the use of trade policy.

Given the importance of services for economic activity in general and the salience of reducing service link costs for overcoming the economic and health challenges emanating from COVID-19, we examine the effect of the pandemic on services trade in the original group of ASEAN+6 countries that began negotiating the RCEP agreement. Stylised facts show that ASEAN+6 commercial services' exports and imports declined by 19.7% and 22.1%, respectively, on a YoY basis during 2020, with considerable heterogeneity across countries and sectors. ASEAN+6 announced greenfield investment in services also fell by a third during 2020, with the intra-ASEAN+6 decline being more severe at 41.8%. Meanwhile, structural gravity estimates suggest that the stringency of containment measures imposed in the wake of the pandemic may have reduced ASEAN+6 services exports by 61.6%.

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 countries, in part by helping to integrate regional markets. The large-scale borrowing associated with BRI projects has given rise to potential debt servicing and sustainability concerns. The rate of return of BRI regional infrastructure projects depends in part on the integrity of public procurement processes and realizing value-for-money objectives. To date BRI projects financed by Chinese institutions have been largely awarded to Chinese companies. Enhancing transparency of BRI procurement processes and international cooperation among countries participating in the BRI would help achieve value for money goals and support the integration of BRI countries.

Literature examining WTO+ commitments in services trade agreements (STAs) has not considered the role of services regulation. We bridge this gap using a sample of 15 South/South-East Asian countries, given the burgeoning trend of Asian economies towards services preferentialism and the largely WTO+ nature of their preferential services commitments. Our empirical findings suggest that Asian trading dyads with regulatory frameworks that are more similar and more trade restrictive tend to undertake higher levels of WTO+ commitments in their STAs. There is also evidence in our results, including by modes of supply, for WTO+ commitments in Asian STAs being driven by goods trade complementarities, alluding to supply chain dynamics in the region. Such results support the hypothesis that the heightened “servicification” of production generates a demand to lower services input costs arising from regulatory incidence and heterogeneity.

More than one-third of the World Trade Organization-notified services trade agreements that were in effect between January 2008 and August 2015 involved at least one South or Southeast Asian trading partner. Drawing on Baier and Bergstrand's ( 2004 ) determinants of preferential trade agreements and using the World Bank's database on the restrictiveness of domestic services regimes (Borchert, Gootiiz, and Mattoo 2012 ), we examine the potential for negotiated regulatory convergence in Asian services markets. Our results suggest that Asian economies with high levels of preexisting bilateral merchandise trade and wide differences in services regulatory frameworks are more likely candidates for services trade agreement formation. Such results lend support to the hypothesis that the heightened “servicification” of production generates demand for the lowered services input costs resulting from negotiated market openings.

This article addresses a potential role that tariff policy can play in encouraging countries to take part in a multilateral effort to mitigate climate change: it complements discussions on border tax adjustment which in law is limited to domestic taxation. It assesses whether increasing tariffs on products from polluting industries amounts to a violation of World Trade Organization (WTO) rules and whether protectionism in this case can be differentiated from genuine environmental concerns. It argues that while lowering tariffs on environmental goods may serve as a carrot to promote dissemination of cleaner technologies, tariff deconsolidation is a legitimate stick to encourage polluting countries to move towards an international climate agreement. The article further explores this view by undertaking a partial equilibrium analysis to examine the impact of a unilateral 5% tariff increase on the most carbon-intensive imports from countries not committed to climate polices. Our results, however, suggest that plurilateral action would be more effective than countries pursuing tariff policy in isolation, with the former leading to an average 1.4% net reduction in carbon-intensive imports from a 5% increase in their tariffs.

India's success story in services is well documented at the national level, but similar literature does not exist for India's states. We bridge this gap by studying India's services growth at the sub-national level. Contrary to earlier commentary on the unsustainability of India's services growth process, our findings suggest that per capita services may be converging across Indian states (this is not true of per capita income); unlike previous studies on India, evidence is provided using both traditional sigma and beta-convergence measures and advanced panel unit root tests from the recent econometrics literature. A disaggregated analysis of services sectors reveals convergence in railways, public administration and financial services. Finally, a Jensen and Kletzer approach to determine tradability and an additional original methodology provide evidence of most services being ‘traded’ across India's states, suggesting the role of such trade in the services growth story even at the sub-national level.

First published: 28 June 2017 Despite the cost and resource-effectiveness of joint trade negotiations and complementarities between goods and services-trade flows, more than 12% of the 132 WTO-notified services-trade agreements (STAs) in force until August 2015 were entered into effect sequentially to goods-trade accords. This stylised fact motivates our study of the determinants of joint versus sequential negotiation/accession of goods and services accords, a subject hitherto unexplored in the growing literature on the determinants of STA membership. Our results suggest larger marginal effects of fundamental economic, geographic, institutional, doing business and services regulatory factors on the propensity of joint negotiation/accession compared to STA formation alone. Moreover, cultural-distance variables are only found to affect the likelihood of joint preferential liberalisation of goods and services trade, without influencing STA-only membership.

This paper takes stock of the forces that lie behind the recent rise of preferential agreements in services trade. Its initial focus is with a number of distinguishing features of services trade that set it apart from trade in goods and shapes trade liberalization and rule-making approaches in the services field. The paper then documents the nature, modal, and sectoral incidence of the trade and investment preferences spawned by preferential trade agreements (PTAs) in services. It does so with a view to addressing the question of how preferential the preferential treatment of services trade is. Finally, the paper addresses a number of considerations arising from attempts to multilateralize preferential access and rule-making in services trade.

This paper studies the government procurement of services from foreign suppliers by conducting a statistical analysis of data submitted by Japan and Switzerland to the WTO's Committee on Government Procurement. Using several metrics, the paper examines whether the WTO's Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA) has led to greater market access for foreign suppliers in services procurement. Our results indicate that despite the GPA, the proportions of services contracts awarded to foreigners have declined over time for both countries and that in the absence of this decline, the value of services contracts awarded to foreign firms would have been more than 15 times higher in the case of Japan and nearly 68 times more in the case of Switzerland. We also find that for the same services categories, the Japanese government is not purchasing as much from abroad as its private sector is importing from the rest of the world, a finding that further points to the home-bias in that government's public purchase decisions.

Using disaggregated quarterly trade data for Switzerland over 2004-2011, we study exchange rate pass through (ERPT) into imported intermediate input prices and its role in the price setting behaviour of exporters. We explicitly include disaggregated proxies for imported input prices in our analyses to investigate whether Swiss ex-porters may have “naturally hedged” exchange rate risks by sourcing inputs from abroad, especially during periods of strong CHF appreciation. Our results indicate high ERPT into imported input prices in all sectors and strong sectoral ERPT heterogeneity on the export side in both the short and long-run. They also suggest the use of “natural hedging” as an effective strategy to reduce exchange rate risks. Significantly however, Swiss exporters may not have adjusted export pricing practice in response to a strong CHF in the wake of the Euro crisis, which questions central bank intervention during that period.

The role of services globalization in inclusive growth is already getting attention in the literature. We add to this literature using India as a case study. India's state-level services value added and employment data studied in this paper reveal that globalization-induced opportunities are filtering down to the country's high per capita income states. More significantly, our empirical analysis, motivated by the New Economic Geography literature and the work of Davis and Weinstein (1996, 1999, 2003), suggests that these opportunities are also creating demand linkages throughout the country. Moreover, the wider network of sub-national demand linkages may be getting formed independently of historical income, skill or locational advantages, which has potentially generalizable implications for other services-globalization-led economies.