WTO Working Papers

Services is the fastest-growing sector of today's global economy and trade in services is the most dynamic segment of world trade. However, its potential remains constrained by a variety of barriers: trade costs are estimated to be almost double those in goods, and more than 40% of trade costs are accounted for by regulation-related factors. Regulatory measures related to the permission to supply a service, i.e. those related to licensing and qualifications requirements and procedures, and technical standards, can particularly affect service suppliers' ability to trade. With a view to mitigating the unintended trade-restrictive effects of such measures, since 2017, a group of Members has been negotiating a set of regulatory disciplines in the context of the Joint Initiative on Services Domestic Regulation.

The WTO Agreement on Agriculture applies to those “agricultural products” as defined in its Annex 1. This definition expressly excludes “fish and fish products” from the scope of application of the Agreement. In light of this exclusion, the paper is intended to provide a historical account of the relationship between agricultural products and fishery products in the context of the negotiations leading to and during the GATT period up to the conclusion of the Uruguay Round, and some of its implications for WTO negotiations.

This paper studies the impact of services liberalization on education and the gender education gap at the district level in India. We focus on the time period 1987 to 1999 and three services sectors - banking, insurance and telecommunications - which were all state monopolies, have been heavily liberalized in the time frame studied, have relatively high shares of female employment and require high education investments. Our hypothesis is that the national-level liberalization spurred higher investment in education, particularly girls’ education, in districts with higher employment growth in these key services sectors.

Regional Trade agreements (RTAs) are sometimes considered as laboratories in which new types of provisions are negotiated to address recent trade-related issues. Although the inclusion of gender-related provisions in RTAs is not a recent phenomenon, only a limited but increasing number of RTAs refer explicitly to gender-related issues. These gender-related provisions are highly heterogeneous and differ in terms of location in the RTA, language, scope and commitments. Some of the most detailed gender-related provisions are found in stand-alone chapters on gender. Cooperation provisions on gender-related issues, including labour, health and social policy, remain the most common type of gender-related provisions found in RTAs.

This study provides a decomposition of the WTO Global Trade Costs Index into five policy-relevant components: transport and travel costs; information and transaction costs; ICT connectedness; trade policy and regulatory differences; and governance quality. The WTO Global Trade Costs Index is based on a new methodology by Egger et al. (2021) that delivers directional trade cost estimates and sector-specific elasticities which are crucial for inferring trade costs from trade flows data. The resulting measure of trade costs includes all factors that burden foreign sales more than domestic ones. In this study, we run a sectoral regression analysis to determine what drives trade costs variation across partners and use the results to decompose the variation in trade costs in each sector.

This paper explores how regulatory responses to emerging IP issues in digital trade may develop at the international level and in particular how existing mechanisms might influence the chances of developing internationally agreed rules in this regard. The primacy of state sovereignty in intellectual property up to the late 19th century gave way to the important WIPO treaties, which still retained some independence of member states and based international regulatory responses directly on national experience. While more regulatory sovereignty was ceded in TRIPS, the WIPO Copyright Treaty and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty, the adoption of non-binding instruments (such as the WIPO Joint Recommendations in the area of trademarks) show the limits of decision making by consensus.

Proper measurement and aggregation of trade costs is of paramount importance for sound academic and policy analysis of the determinants - particularly those of policy - of economic outcomes. The international trade profession has witnessed signifcant new developments, both on the theoretical and on the empirical side, concerning the measurement and decomposition of such costs into variable and fixed costs on the one hand and into partial and general equilibrium effects on the other hand.

What is the value of the WTO Committee on Agriculture? How much trade do countries talk about at the WTO? Do low-income countries participate less than they should in the work of the Committee? How important are issues not covered by notifications? What are the most important issues on which to focus negotiations?

We collect a novel dataset that covers about 130 countries and the six four-digit live animal categories in the Harmonized System (HS) over a sixteen-year period, to study the link between illicit trade in live animals and threat to animal health from infectious diseases.

In this paper, we investigate tourism-related policy approaches that WTO member countries adopted in the early weeks of the COVID-19 crisis. We highlight the need for stakeholders to coordinate their responses in order to mitigate the negative crisis effects and better prepare the sector for the future. In doing so, we explore the economic impact of potential tourism scenarios, underlining both the demand and supply side effects of the crisis.

In this paper we provide some evidence of the common claim that STCs improve transparency and monitoring as well as help mitigate trade conflicts.

This paper provides an economic analysis of the trade conflict between the US and China, providing an overview of the tariff increases, a discussion of the background of the trade conflict, and an analysis of the economic effects of the trade conflict, based both on empirics (ex post analysis) and on simulations (ex ante analysis).

This paper reviews the main developments of trade and related policies and measures in the Asia and Pacific region during the 30 years since establishment, in 1989, of the Trade Policy Review Mechanism (TPRM). The objectives of the TPRM include facilitating the smooth functioning of the multilateral trading system by enhancing the transparency of WTO Members' trade policies.

The main purpose of the paper is to present the coverage of SPS systems in SSA countries by TPR reports, and their main findings. It also opens the discussion as to whether the SPS analytical framework in TPR reports has been sufficiently comprehensive and beneficial in guiding technical assistance (TPR follow-up) activities in SSA. At the outset, we briefly present the strategic importance of agriculture in SSA countries, with a description of the link between an effective SPS regulatory system and the performance of agriculture.

The gains from trade depend on the reallocation of resources, including labour, across firms and sectors. However, workers are unlikely to be fully mobile since there are barriers to sectoral and geographical mobility due to social reasons such as family or existing private and professional networks. If these barriers depend on specific characteristics of workers, such as education, gender or race, this has important implications for inequality.

Despite its substantial and increasing importance to health systems and inclusive economic growth, the relationship between international trade in services and health worker mobility has been largely unexplored. However, international health worker mobility and trade in services have both been increasing rapidly, and at a growing pace in recent years.