Download Free Quantifying The Benefits Of Liberalising Trade In Services Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Quantifying The Benefits Of Liberalising Trade In Services and write the review.

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.
Abstract: Since the mid 1980s a substantial amount of research has been undertaken on trade in services. Much of this is inspired by the World Trade Organization or regional trade agreements, especially the European Union, but an increasing number of papers focus on the impacts of services sector liberalization. This paper surveys the literature, focusing on contributions that investigate the determinants of international trade and investment in services, the potential gains from greater trade (and liberalization), and efforts to cooperate to achieve such liberalization through trade agreements. It concludes that there is increasing evidence that services liberalization is an important source of potential welfare gains, but relatively little research has been done that can inform the design of international cooperation-both trade agreements and development assistance-so as to more effectively promote development objectives.
The author examines the special role that trade liberalization in services industries can play in stimulating trade in both services, and goods. International trade in goods requires inputs from such trade services as transportation, insurance, and finance, for example. Restrictions on services across borders, and within foreign countries add costs, and barriers to international trade. Liberalizing trade in services could also facilitate trade in goods, providing more benefits than one might expect from analysis merely of the services trade. To emphasize the point, the author notes that the benefits for trade are arguably enhanced by the phenomenon of fragmentation. The more that production processes become split across locations, with the fragments tied together, and coordinated by various trade services, the greater the gains from reductions in the costs of services. The incentives for such fragmentation can be greater across countries, than within countries, because of the greater differences in factor prices, and technologies. But the service costs of international fragmentation can also be larger, especially if regulations, and restrictions impede the international provision of services. As a result, trade liberalization in services can stimulate the fragmentation of production of both goods, and services, thus increasing international trade, and the gains from trade even further. Since fragmentation seems to characterize an increasing portion of world specialization, the importance of service liberalization is growing apace.
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.
Deep trade agreements (DTAs) cover not just trade but additional policy areas, such as international flows of investment and labor and the protection of intellectual property rights and the environment. Their goal is integration beyond trade or deep integration. These agreements matter for economic development. Their rules influence how countries (and hence, the people and firms that live and operate within them) transact, invest, work, and ultimately, develop. Trade and investment regimes determine the extent of economic integration, competition rules affect economic efficiency, intellectual property rights matter for innovation, and environmental and labor rules contribute to environmental and social outcomes. This Handbook provides the tools and data needed to analyze these new dimensions of integration and to assess the content and consequences of DTAs. The Handbook and the accompanying database are the result of collaboration between experts in different policy areas from academia and other international organizations, including the International Trade Centre (ITC), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), and World Trade Organization (WTO).
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.
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.