This paper presents new high‐frequency data on trade policy changes targeting medical and food products since the beginning of the COVID‐19 pandemic, documenting how countries used trade policy instruments in response to the health crisis on a week‐by‐week basis. The data set reveals a rapid increase in trade policy activism in February and March 2020 in tandem with the rise in COVID‐19 cases but also uncovers extensive heterogeneity across countries in both their use of trade policy and the types of measures used. Some countries acted to restrict exports and facilitate imports, others targeted only one of these margins, and many did not use trade policy at all. The observed heterogeneity suggests numerous research questions on the drivers of trade policy responses to COVID‐19, on the effects of these measures on trade and prices of critical products, and on the role of trade agreements in influencing the use of trade policy.

The Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (RSCAS), created in 1992 and directed by Professor Brigid Laffan, aims to develop inter-disciplinary and comparative research and to promote work on the major issues facing the process of integration and European society.The Centre is home to a large post-doctoral programme and hosts major research programmes and projects, and a range of working groups and ad hoc initiatives. The research agenda is organised around a set of core themes and is continuously evolving, reflecting the changing agenda of European integration and the expanding membership of the European Union.

With an increasing number of Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) covering trade in services, we explore the impact of PTAs on services trade. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper in this literature that endogenizes the impact of preferentialism in estimating the trade effect. We also add to this literature by distilling the trade effect of PTAs into that emanating from services and "goods only" agreements and further confirm complementarities between the two. Moreover, we study these relationships disaggregated by the economic status of the partner countries and by the reciprocity of commitments. Our results suggest trade effects of 11.6 -12.7% from having a services accord alone. They also reveal that the underlying services trade between countries has been driven as much by IRS as by factor differences and that asymmetric trade alliance between North-South partners has been successful in fostering inter-industry trade.

This paper studies the government procurement of services from foreign suppliers by conducting a statistical analysis of data submitted by Japan and Switzerland to the WTO's Committee on Government Procurement. Using several metrics, the paper examines whether the WTO's Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA) has led to greater market access for foreign suppliers in services procurement. Our results indicate that despite the GPA, the proportions of services contracts awarded to foreigners have declined over time for both countries and that in the absence of this decline, the value of services contracts awarded to foreign firms would have been more than 15 times higher in the case of Japan and nearly 68 times more in the case of Switzerland. We also find that for the same services categories, the Japanese government is not purchasing as much from abroad as its private sector is importing from the rest of the world, a finding that further points to the home-bias in that government's public purchase decisions.

The extent of discrimination in government procurement and its impact on economic efficiency has attracted both theoretical and analytical work, but little econometric evidence. We bridge this gap by building a new sector-level dataset on domestic and foreign purchases by Japanese and Swiss governments over 1990-2003 to undertake "new" econometric analyses. Unlike previous work, we explain home-bias using variables inspired by the political economy, trade-macroeconomic and procurement literatures. We also provide "new" econometric evidence for previous theoretical predictions. Our results reveal the importance of domestic-foreign productivity differences in governments' cross-border purchases and also support previous theoretical predictions. However, Membership of the World Trade Organizations's Agreement on Government Procurement is not found to increase market access.

No abstract

This paper presents new high frequency data on trade policy changes targeting medical and food products since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, documenting how countries used trade policy instruments in response to the health crisis on a week-by-week basis. The dataset reveals a rapid increase in trade policy activism in February and March 2020 in tandem with the rise in COVID-19 cases, but also uncovers extensive heterogeneity across countries in both their use of trade policy and the types of measures used. Some countries acted to restrict exports and facilitate imports, others targeted only one of these margins, and many did not use trade policy at all. The observed heterogeneity suggests numerous research questions on the drivers of trade policy responses to COVID-19, on the effects of these measures on trade and prices of critical products, and on the role of trade agreements in influencing the use of trade policy.

No abstract