With international trade tariffs at historically low levels today, non-tariff measures (NTMs) play an important-and growing-role in global trade policy. Concerns about shifts in global trade policy agendas are on the rise. In this paper, we rely on a gravity model and focus on Chinese exports with two aims: the first is to test for heterogeneous effects of technical NTMs versus non-technical NTMs; the second is to verify whether the NTM's effect is influenced by the type of good (final good vs. intermediate or capital good). We find that: 1) technical NTMs tend to have positive effects on trade flows, potentially driven by improvements in consumers' confidence and by the technical capacities of Chinese exporters and 2) non-technical NTMs are particularly stringent for final goods, possibly due to political economy reasons or substitution effects.
This paper uses a gravity model approach to estimate the effects of Brexit in two dimensions: trade in goods and migration. We simulate two scenarios: 1) no agreement with reversion to WTO rules and no special treatment for migrants; 2) signature of a bilateral free trade agreement (FTA). According to our results, Brexit may have large negative effects on trade and migration flows between the EU and the UK. In the WTO scenario, trade flows are predicted to drop by 30% and migration by close to 25%. If the UK and the EU sign an FTA-like agreement (which does not include free mobility of labour), the negative effects on trade are lessened although there is no significant difference in terms of migration with respect to the WTO scenario.
views expressed in this manuscript are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Banco de España or the Eurosystem. I would like to express my gratitude to my advisors Stefano Battilossi and Pilar Nogues-Marco, and to Markus Lampe for their extensive and insightful comments and many discussions on early versions of this paper. I am also grateful to Antonio Tena for sharing his international trade database. I wish to thank the editors and participants of the EREH Fast Track Meeting for their detailed comments, particularly Dan Bogart, Joan Roses, Nikolaus Wolf and Neil Cummins. I also would like to thank
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