Impact Assessment

Trade regulation critically depends on the availability of appropriate tools for assessing the impact of planned or existing policies and norms. A broad range of impact-assessment techniques will be developed and applied in order to shed light on the issue of how policy affects outcome variables. The focus of the individual projects is on the impact of trade on wages and the localisation of economic activity; the impact of institutional arrangements on policy quality; the impact of preferential trade arrangements on firm behaviour and performance; the identification of outcome variables capable of generating policy-relevant classifications of countries and products; the impact of financial regulation on the capacity of financial systems to distribute the gains and losses from trade; and the impact of trade on individual perceptions.