Quantifying the Benefits of Liberalising Trade in Services

Quantifying the Benefits of Liberalising Trade in Services PDF Author: OECD
Publisher: OECD Publishing
ISBN: 9264100431
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Get Book Here

Book Description
Amongst other issues, the papers in this volume explore fundamental issues for empirical research on trade in services. It highlights the specific data requirements and conceptual challenges for modelling liberalisation of services.

Quantifying the Benefits of Liberalising Trade in Services

Quantifying the Benefits of Liberalising Trade in Services PDF Author: OECD
Publisher: OECD Publishing
ISBN: 9264100431
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Get Book Here

Book Description
Amongst other issues, the papers in this volume explore fundamental issues for empirical research on trade in services. It highlights the specific data requirements and conceptual challenges for modelling liberalisation of services.

Quantifying the Benefits of Services Trade Liberalisation

Quantifying the Benefits of Services Trade Liberalisation PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Free trade
Languages : en
Pages : 74

Get Book Here

Book Description


Quantifying the Benefits of Services Trade Liberalisation

Quantifying the Benefits of Services Trade Liberalisation PDF Author: Australia. Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description


Measuring Services Trade Liberalization and Its Impact on Economic Growth

Measuring Services Trade Liberalization and Its Impact on Economic Growth PDF Author: Aaditya Mattoo
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN:
Category : Desarrollo economico
Languages : en
Pages : 40

Get Book Here

Book Description
Countries that fully liberalize their telecommunications and financial services sectors may be able to expect economic growth rates up to 1.5 percentage point higher than rates in other countries.

Quantifying the Impact of Services Liberalization in a Developing Country

Quantifying the Impact of Services Liberalization in a Developing Country PDF Author: Denise Eby Konan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 31

Get Book Here

Book Description
Konan and Maskus consider how service liberalization differs from goods liberalization in terms of welfare, the level and composition of output, and factor prices within a developing economy, in this case Tunisia. Despite recent movements toward liberalization, Tunisian service sectors remain largely closed to foreign participation and are provided at high cost relative to many developing nations. The authors develop a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of the Tunisian economy with multiple products and services and three trading partners. They model goods liberalization as the unilateral removal of product tariffs. Restraints on services trade involve both restrictions on cross-border supply (mode 1 in the GATS) and on foreign ownership through foreign direct investment (mode 3 in the GATS). The former are modeled as tariff-equivalent price wedges while the latter are comprised of both monopoly-rent distortions (arising from imperfect competition among domestic producers) and inefficiency costs (arising from a failure of domestic service providers to adopt least-cost practices). They find that goods-trade liberalization yields a gain in aggregate welfare and reorients production toward sectors of benchmark comparative advantage. However, a reduction of services barriers in a way that permits greater competition through foreign direct investment generates larger welfare gains. Service liberalization also requires lower adjustment costs, measured in terms of sectoral movement of workers, than does goods-trade liberalization. And it tends to increase economic activity in all sectors and raise the real returns to both capital and labor. The overall welfare gains of comprehensive service liberalization amount to more than 5 percent of initial consumption. The bulk of these gains come from opening markets for finance, business services, and telecommunications. Because these are key inputs into all sectors of the economy, their liberalization cuts costs and drives larger efficiency gains overall. The results point to the potential importance of deregulating services provision for economic development.This paper - product of the Trade, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the department to measure the benefits of services trade.

Quantifying Services-Trade Liberalization

Quantifying Services-Trade Liberalization PDF Author: Dan Ciuriak
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 35

Get Book Here

Book Description
It has long been established in theory that uncertainty impacts on firm behaviour. However, the empirical basis for quantifying the uncertainty-reducing effects of trade agreements has not been firmly established. In this paper, we develop estimates of the effect of reducing uncertainty regarding market access on cross-border services trade by making commitments that are bound under a trade agreement. Specifically, we identify the effect of services trade restrictions on cross-border services trade, as measured by the OECD's Services Trade Restrictiveness Index (STRI), and the separate effect of “water” in countries' WTO bindings, as assessed by the difference between their commitments under the General Agreement on Trade in Services and their applied level of market access, as captured by their STRI scores. Using a gravity model, we find that services trade responds positively but inelastically to reductions in services trade barriers, as measured by the STRI, and that the response to actual restrictions is about twice as strong as the response to comparable reductions in uncertainty, as measured by water. Responses are highly heterogeneous across services sectors. We suggest how these results can be used provisionally to quantitatively assess the impact of trade agreements in CGE modelling frameworks, taking into account not only actual liberalization of market access terms and conditions, but also the extent of binding of those commitments.

Measuring Services Trade Liberalization and its Impact on Economic Growth

Measuring Services Trade Liberalization and its Impact on Economic Growth PDF Author: Aaditya Mattoo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 36

Get Book Here

Book Description
Countries that fully liberalize their telecommunications and financial services sectors may be able to expect economic growth rates up to 1.5 percentage points higher than rates in other countries. Mattoo, Rathindran, and Subramanian explain how the output growth effect from liberalizing the service sectors differs from the effect from liberalizing trade in goods. They also suggest using a policy-based rather than outcome-based measure of the openness of a country's services regime. They construct such openness measures for two key service sectors' basic telecommunications and financial services.Finally, the authors provide some econometric evidence - relatively strong for the financial sector and less strong, but nevertheless statistically significant, for the telecommunications sector - that openness in services influences long-run growth performance. Their estimates suggest that growth rates in countries with fully open telecommunications and financial services sectors are up to 1.5 percentage points higher than those in other countries.This paper - a product of Trade, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to assess the implications of liberalizing trade in services.

Assessing the Benefits to Developing Countries of Liberalisation in Services Trade

Assessing the Benefits to Developing Countries of Liberalisation in Services Trade PDF Author: John Whalley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
This paper discusses the potential impacts of services trade liberalisation on developing countries and reviews existing quantitative studies. Its purpose is to distill themes from current literature rather than to advocate specific policy changes. The picture emerging is one of valiant attempts to quantify in the presence of formidable analytical and data problems yielding only a clouded image of likely impacts on trade, consumption, production and welfare emerging to the point that the policy implications of results are not always clear. A central intuition would seem to be that with genuine two-sided (OECD/non-OECD) liberalisation in services that are seemingly considerably labour-intensive in delivery, the potential should be there for significant developing country gains from global liberalisation allowing full cross-border delivery. However, this picture is neither fully endorsed by available studies, neither is it explicitly contradicted. This seems to be the case for a number of reasons. One difficulty with the studies is that the conceptual underpinnings of what determines trade in services and how this trade differs analytically from that of trade in goods (if at all) is an issue prior to assessments of impacts of liberalisation of trade in services on developing countries being discussed. Key issues here are the treatment of mobility for service providers (both firms and workers), and the differing analytical structures needed to analyse individual service items (banking, insurance, telecoms, etc.). Some recent analytical work suggests that liberalisation in some service items, such as banking, need not always yield gains, and this contrasts with quantitative studies where analytical structures mirror conventional trade in goods treatments. The discussion and measurement of barriers to service trade in both developed and developing countries is also problematic. One is talking of domestic regulation, entry barriers, portability of providers, competition policy regimes more so than only barriers at national borders, as with tariffs. Both representing and quantifying such barriers raise major difficulties, and these are also spelled out in the paper. Which barriers actually restrict trade, and which do not because they are redundant is one issue, for instance. It is also often misleading to represent barriers in simple ad valorem equivalent form. As a result, numerical modelling work on the effects of service trade barriers which is based on ad valorem equivalent modelling is often not fully convincing. In addition, individual country results vary considerably across studies in ways that it is frequently hard for outsiders to understand. Studies do, however, point towards a tentative conclusion that effects are small and positive for developed and most developing countries if FDI flow changes accompanying service trade liberalisation are excluded from the analysis, but much larger and more variable across countries if they are present. This could be taken to suggest that mode 3 GATS liberalisation (roughly captured in some studies) might be important for developing countries; but mode 4 GATS liberalisation could be even more important given large barriers to labour flows across countries. Thus, if service trade liberalisation is thought of primarily as a surrogate for improved functioning of global factor markets in which more capital flows to developing countries and more labour flows from them to developed countries, then developing countries could benefit in a major way from genuine two-sided (OECD/non-OECD) liberalisation. Developing countries fear, however, that in global negotiations on services liberalisation where there is an asymmetry of power that largely one-sided liberalisation may be the outcome, and their gains will be correspondingly limited. The paper concludes by evaluating econometric studies on linkage between services liberalisation and country growth rules, and briefly discusses some key sectoral issues in health services and transportation.

Measuring the Costs and Benefits of Liberalization of Trade in Services

Measuring the Costs and Benefits of Liberalization of Trade in Services PDF Author: Isabelle Rabaud
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 22

Get Book Here

Book Description
This paper draws insights from the literature on Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) Modeling of potential gains from liberalization for developing countries, in particular Northern, Eastern and Southern African economies. Due to the importance of regulatory framework and to the size of service industries, substantial potential gains are expected from liberalization, by accession to WTO, regional, preferential or bilateral trade agreements. However, it seems that attention should be focused on the specificity of each region and country and that a sectoral approach is necessary. Regarding the choice between multilateral, bilateral or regional liberalization, the optimal framework depends on service industries. Institutions particularly matter for services and reforms should be global and focused. Domestic reforms are necessary prior to trade liberalization.

Assessing the Benefits to Developing Countries of Liberalization in Services Trade

Assessing the Benefits to Developing Countries of Liberalization in Services Trade PDF Author: John Whalley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Commerce
Languages : en
Pages : 59

Get Book Here

Book Description
This paper discusses the potential impacts of services trade liberalization on developing countries and reviews existing quantitative studies. Its purpose is to distill themes from current literature rather than to advocate specific policy changes. The picture emerging is one of valiant attempts to quantify in the presence of formidable analytical and data problems yielding only a clouded image of likely impacts on trade, consumption, production, and welfare.