The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has reinvigorated research on the ex-ante impact of trade agreements. The results from these ex-ante models are subject to considerable uncertainties, and needs to be complimented by ex-post studies. The paper fills this gap in recent literature by employing synthetic control methods (SCM) – currently extremely popular in micro and macro studies – to understand the impact of trade agreements in the period 1983–1995 for 104 country pairs. The key advantage of using SCM to address selection bias – one of the persisting issues in trade literature – is that it allows the effect of unobserved confounder to vary with time, as opposed to traditional econometric methods that can deal with time-invariant unobserved country characteristics. Using SCM approach, the paper finds that trade agreements can generate substantial gains, on average an increase of exports by 80 percentage points over ten years. The export gains are higher when emerging markets have trade agreements with advanced markets. The paper shows that all the countries in NAFTA have substantially gained due to NAFTA. Finally, there is some evidence that trade agreements can potentially lead to slight import diversion, but not export diversion.

This publication displays the menu for choice of available methods to evaluate the impact of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). It caters mainly to policy makers from developing countries and aims to equip them with some economic knowledge and techniques that will enable them to conduct their own economic evaluation studies on existing or future FTAs, or to critically re-examine the results of impact assessment studies conducted by others, at the very least.

Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) have proliferated in East Asia as regional economies rush to catch up with the rest of the world — but what difference do they make? This book answers that question by providing an up-to-date assessment of the quality and impact of FTAs in the region. Featuring a collection of papers originally written for the prestigious Research Institute for Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI) in Tokyo, it presents contemporary analysis and insights into the evolution of recent FTAs. The book is suitable for use by trade policy negotiators, policy analysts, and people developing business strategies in organizations, as well as graduate students and researchers in the field.

A multi-disciplinary investigation of how economic globalization can help achieve the UN's 2030 Agenda, exploring trade-offs among the Goals.

Trade flows and trade policies need to be properly quantified to describe, compare, or follow the evolution of policies between sectors or countries or over time. This is essential to ensure that policy choices are made with an appropriate knowledge of the real conditions. This practical guide introduces the main techniques of trade and trade policy data analysis. It shows how to develop the main indexes used to analyze trade flows, tariff structures, and non-tariff measures. It presents the databases needed to construct these indexes as well as the challenges faced in collecting and processing these data, such as measurement errors or aggregation bias. Written by experts with practical experience in the field, A Practical Guide to Trade Policy Analysis has been developed to contribute to enhance developing countries' capacity to analyze and implement trade policy. It offers a hands-on introduction on how to estimate the distributional effects of trade policies on welfare, in particular on inequality and poverty. The guide is aimed at government experts engaged in trade negotiations, as well as students and researchers involved in trade-related study or research. An accompanying DVD contains data sets and program command files required for the exercises. Copublished by the WTO and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development

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).

One cannot exaggerate the importance of estimating how international trade responds to changes in income and prices. But there is a tension between whether one should use models that fit the data but that contradict certain aspects of the underlying theory or models that fit the theory but contradict certain aspects of the data. The essays in Estimating Trade Elasticities book offer one practical approach to deal with this tension. The analysis starts with the practical implications of optimising behaviour for estimation and it follows with a re-examination of the puzzling income elasticity for US imports that three decades of studies have not resolved. The analysis then turns to the study of the role of income and prices in determining the expansion in Asian trade, a study largely neglected in fifty years of research. With the new estimates of trade elasticities, the book examines how they assist in restoring the consistency between elasticity estimates and the world trade identity.