WP6

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.

Leadership:

cadot_o

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Cluster 1

This cluster deals with the consequences of trade-policy changes for economic and political institutions in developing countries. Regarding political institutions, we explore the circumstances under which trade sanctions are successful in promoting democratization. Regarding economic institutions, the idea is that heightened competitive pressure makes complementary reforms more urgent. The areas of reform considered are competition policy and financial market regulations.

Leadership:

oechslin_m

6.1.2

Trade sanctions, regime change, and democratiz ...

This project explores whether and under which circumsta ...

6.1.3

More trade, more competition? – Openness and c ...

Using detailed firm-level data from Uruguay’s National ...

6.1.4

Openness and financial-sector reform

This project studies the impact of trade liberalization ...

Cluster 2

Trade policy has come to entail much more than tariff setting. In fact, a range of “trade facilitation” measures are now part and parcel of trade liberalizing reforms, especially in developing countries. The first part of this cluster comprises closely related research projects that use modern tools of causal inference to evaluate the economic impact of “aid for trade” policy measures. The second part examines the impact of SPS measures on trade flows.

Leadership:

shingal_a

6.2.1

Ex-post evaluation of Aid for Trade

WP 6.2.1 evaluates the impact of aid for trade through ...

6.2.2

Estimating the trade effects of maximum residu ...

WP 6.2.2 examines the impact of maximum residue levels ...

Cluster 3

This cluster contains two projects that examine the impact of trade on intra-national economic geographies. To date, economic research on the effects of trade liberalization has mainly examined changes in specialization across firms, sectors or factors of production. While such allocation effects are important, one dimension has been strikingly absent from the literature: space. We therefore study intra-national spatial adjustment patterns following the opening of international trade, working with data from Austria and India.

Leadership:

brülhart_m

6.3.1