This title provides a comprehensive introduction to the key issues in trade and liberalization of services. Providing a useful overview of the players involved, the barriers to trade, and case studies in a number of service industries, this is ideal for policymakers and students interested in trade.

We study the effects of a bank's engagement in trading. Traditional banking is relationship-based: not scalable, long-term oriented, with high implicit capital, and low risk (thanks to the law of large numbers). Trading is transactions-based: scalable, shortterm, capital constrained, and with the ability to generate risk from concentrated positions. When a bank engages in trading, it can use its ‘spare’ capital to profitablity expand the scale of trading. However, there are two inefficiencies. A bank may allocate too much capital to trading ex-post, compromising the incentives to build relationships ex-ante. And a bank may use trading for risk-shifting. Financial development augments the scalability of trading, which initially benefits conglomeration, but beyond some point inefficiencies dominate. The deepending of the financial markets in recent decades leads trading in banks to become increasingly risky, so that problems in managing and regulating trading in banks will persist for the foreseeable future. The analysis has implications for capital regulation, subsidiarization, and scope and scale restrictions in banking.

The stakes were high in the financial services negotiations that were completed in December 1997 at the World Trade Organization (WTO). The developing countries were eager to strengthen and modernize their financial systems. The industrial countries sought access to important emerging markets in Latin America and Asia for their banking, insurance, brokerage, and other financial services firms. In the end, both sides agreed to bind unilateral and regional financial opening and reform that was already under way in many countries, industrial and developing alike. The authors assess the agreement reached in the WTO, identifying its shortcomings and suggesting ways that it can be bolstered in future negotiations. They analyze the impact of the agreement, and of the Asian financial crisis, on the state of liberalization and market opening in several important emerging-market economies--including a summary of the remaining obstacles to establishing efficient and open financial sectors. This book estimates the benefits of opening the financial sector to foreign competition. It assesses the macroeconomic benefits that flow from an improved financial sector and discusses the risks and costs involved in liberalization. The authors conclude with a blueprint for future efforts to liberalize financial services and emphasize that the recent financial services agreement represented only a beginning step in that process.

With the establishment of the WTO, trade in services became part of the world trade order. Volume 6 is dedicated to these rather recent developments. It covers the core agreement, the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) with annexes, as well as the additional instruments , which have been adopted later on to govern the liberalization in specific sectors. Those are the Understanding on Commitments in Financial Services, the Second Protocol on Financial Services, the Third Protocol on the Movement of Natural Persons, the Fourth Protocol on Basic Telecommunications and the Fifth Protocol, which contains further rules for financial services. This volume will be a valuable reference tool for the WTO community as a whole, as well as for professionals and researchers, who deal with one of the sectors concerned, e.g. financial services and telecommunications. Furthermore, it is highly relevant in view of those sectors, which are the subject of ongoing liberalization efforts or earmarked for future negotiations, namely accounting, legal services, transport, tourism, environmental services, legal and educational services.

The vast majority of international trade is supported by some form of trade financing: a specialized, sometimes complex form of financing that is poorly understood even by bankers and seasoned finance and treasury experts. Financing Trade and International Supply Chains takes the mystery out of trade and supply chain finance, providing a practical, straightforward overview of a discipline that is fundamental to the successful conduct of trade: trade that contributes to the creation of economic value, poverty reduction and international development, while increasing prosperity across the globe. The book suggests that every trade or supply chain finance solution, no matter how elaborate, addresses some combination of four elements: facilitation of secure and timely payment, effective mitigation of risk, provision of financing and liquidity, and facilitation of transactional and financial information flow. The book includes observations on the effective use of traditional mechanisms such as Documentary Letters of Credit, as well as an overview of emerging supply chain finance solutions and programs, critical to the financing of strategic suppliers and other members of complex supply chain ecosystems. The important role of export credit agencies and international financial institutions is explored, and innovations such as the Bank Payment Obligation are addressed in detail. Financing Trade and International Supply Chains is a valuable resource for practitioners, business executives, entrepreneurs and others involved in international commerce and trade. This book balances concept with practical insight, and can help protect the financial interests of companies pursuing opportunity in international markets.

Operations in Financial Services establishes a framework for this research area from an operations management perspective. The first section presents an introduction and provides an overview of the topic. The second section establishes links between the current state of the art in relevant areas of operations management and operations research and three of the more important aspects of operations in financial services - (i) financial product design and testing, (ii) process delivery design, and (iii) process delivery management. The third section focuses on the current issues that are important in the financial services operations area. These issues center primarily on mobile online banking and trading in a global environment. The fourth section discusses operational risk aspects of financial services. The final section concludes with a discussion on research directions that may become of interest in the future.

This edition of the OECD Sovereign Borrowing Outlook reviews developments in response to the COVID-19 pandemic for government borrowing needs, funding conditions and funding strategies in the OECD area.