Globalisation

Blog

VoxEU:

Tariff confusion

The year 2025 was unprecedented in the frequency, complexity, and volatility of US trade policy interventions. This column uses a new database tracking US tariff announcements during the year to show that confusion about...Read more...

Journal article

Review of International Economics:

Value co-creation and value capture in digital innovation ecosystems: a multiple case study in the agrifood sector

We use a large episode of trade liberalization in Spain to test a rich set of channels linking trade and markups. The effect of reductions in import tariffs on firm-level and aggregate markups is pro-competitive, but the...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management:

Trade and the scopes of pollution: evidence from China?s world market integration

Although the environmental impact of trade has been a long-standing concern, there is still scant evidence on the channels through which international market access affects pollution. We exploit the unique episode of Chi...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

World trade remains dangerously dependent on a handful of shipping lanes

The conflict in Iran has been reignited by disagreements about control of a critical shipping lane. But the Strait of Hormuz is not the only chokepoint making global trade vulnerable. Ferdinand Rauch, Stephan Maurer and ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade and the scopes of pollution: evidence from China's world market integration

Although the environmental impact of trade has been a long-standing concern, there is still scant evidence on the channels through which international market access affects pollution. We exploit the unique episode of Chi...Read more...

CentrePiece article

My must-read paper

Discover Swati Dhingra?s recommended reading on trade economics...Read more...

Blog

Project Syndicate:

Europe does not lack capital - it lacks scale

Even the best start ups cannot thrive sustainably in an environment where each country protects its national champions, and where administrative barriers prevent the emergence of truly European ones. If Europe wants to b...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Accommodating emerging giants in the global economy

History provides many examples of large changes in the relative economic size of nations. This column examines the impact of rapid economic growth in emerging economies on the income and welfare of other nations and the ...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Big cities and globalisation

Globalisation has deepened economic inequalities between large cities and the rest. This column examines foreign trade integration in larger cities versus other regions across Brazil, China, France, and the US. Larger ci...Read more...

Journal article

International Economics:

Reassessing EU comparative advantage: the role of technology

Based on a sufficient statistics approach, we show how the state of technology of European industries relative to the rest of the world can be empirically assessed in a way that is simple in terms of computation, parsimo...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

The impact of the 2025 US tariff announcements on UK firms

In the first half of 2025, the US and some of its trading partners announced significant changes to import tariffs. This column uses newly designed questions to study the impact of these changes on UK firms and to assess...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

An alliance for open trade: How to counter Trump's tariffs

The US administration's latest threat to impose sweeping new tariffs on many of its closest allies signals a renewed embrace of aggressive unilateralism and misunderstood economics. This column argues that the only effec...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

How the 2018/19 US tariffs against China boosted exports and employment in Mexico

In 2018 and 2019, the US administration hiked tariffs on imports from China. This column shows that imports from Mexico partly filled the gap, leading to an export and employment surge in Mexico. Using highly disaggregat...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

The 2025 trade war: Dynamic impacts across US states and the global economy

In 2025, the US government announced a series of tariff increases targeting major trading partners, including Canada, China, and Mexico. This column estimates the economic consequences of these proposed tariffs to the US...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

The US-China trade war created jobs (elsewhere)

In June 2016, Donald Trump justified the protectionist policies during his first administration as "the quickest way to bring our jobs back to our country". This column shows that while the trade war with China failed to...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Putting quantitative models to the test: an application to the US-China trade war

The primary motivation behind quantitative work in international trade and many other fields is to shed light on the economic consequences of policy changes and other shocks. To help assess and potentially strengthen the...Read more...

Blog

LSE Politics and Policy:

Do Trump's tariffs signal the end of globalisation?

In this second instalment of his interview with Alexis Papazoglou, Thomas Sampson highlights the many uncertainties the future of global trade faces and argues that the biggest policy question for countries around the wo...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Deep integration and trade: UK firms in the wake of Brexit

How does dismantling deep integration affect international trade? This column uses firm-level customs data to study the impact of Brexit on UK goods trade. The authors find that in the short term, exit from the Single Ma...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade with nominal rigidities: understanding the unemployment and welfare effects of the China shock

We present a dynamic quantitative trade and migration model that incorporates downward nominal wage rigidities and show how this framework can generate changes in unemployment and labor participation that match those unc...Read more...

External report

International Trade: Issue 2

Over the last four decades, many developing countries initiated reforms that have lowered barriers to trade. Yet despite these reforms, developing countries still remain far less open than developed ones, both because of...Read more...

External report

Foreign Direct Investment

Multinational enterprises are at the centre of policy debates in low- and middle-income countries. As some of the most productive and innovative firms in the world, which are at the core of global supply chains, multinat...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

What impact have trade sanctions had on Russia? (Podcast)

Recorded at the CEPR Paris Symposium. How effective have the trade sanctions imposed on Russia in 2022 been? Politically, they were comprehensive and quick. But anecdotal reporting has suggested that Russian firms that w...Read more...

Blog

EGC Voices in Development:

Development Dialogue: How can emerging economies break free from the sidelines of global trade? (podcast)

This episode of Development Dialogues addresses how lower-income countries have engaged with global trade. How have their approaches to trade differed based on their underlying institutional and economic structure? What ...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

High moments for superstar exporters

Aggregate exports are highly concentrated in a small group of firms, which are generally more productive than other firms. This column shows that productivity shocks generate different responses of aggregate exports depe...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The distributional consequences of trade: evidence from the Grain Invasion

We examine the distributional consequences of trade using the New World Grain Invasion that occurred in the second half of the 19th century. We use a newly-created dataset on population, employment by sector, property va...Read more...

Journal article

Critical Sociology:

A popular backlash against globalization?

Is there a popular backlash against globalization? When did it start and in which forms? What do we know about its causes? We address these questions in the context of advanced democracies. We see the `globalization back...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Putting quantitative models to the test: an application to Trump's trade war

The primary motivation behind quantitative modeling in international trade and many other fields is to shed light on the economic consequences of policy changes. To help assess and potentially strengthen the credibility ...Read more...

Blog

United States Politics and Policy:

Will the US remain the world's superpower? | LSE iQ and The Ballpark podcast

A shining city on a hill. America the beautiful. The United States has long been mythologised as the land of dreams and opportunity. And since the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s it has been undisputedly the ...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Trade liberalisation can weaken unions and reduce votes for the left

Intuitively, trade liberalisation should increase the appeal of left-wing parties that offer to protect workers with protectionist policies. Pedro Ogeda, Emanuel Ornelas and Rodrigo Soares use evidence from Brazil to sho...Read more...

Blog

Vox Lacea:

Brazil's comparative advantage in soybean production triggered deforestation

In today's globalised world, technology and trade are key driving forces shaping agricultural markets worldwide. Igor Carreira, Francisco Costa and Joao Paulo Pessoa delve into the intricate relationship between trade an...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The social footprint of globalization: towards the introduction of strategic industries in quantitative trade models

We argue that our understanding of industrial policy in the presence of 'strategic' industries that exert positive externalities on the national economy may benefit from an extension of quantitative general equilibrium t...Read more...

Journal article

Spatial Economic Analysis:

The social footprint of globalisation: towards the introduction of strategic industries in quantitative trade models

We argue that our understanding of industrial policy in the presence of `strategic? industries that exert positive externalities on the national economy may benefit from an extension of quantitative general equilibrium t...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Joining multinationals' supply chains can benefit domestic firms' performance

Developing countries compete to attract multinationals to induce development. Becoming suppliers to multinationals could improve domestic firms' technology and managerial practices, and the host country's economy could b...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Exporting ideas: knowledge flows from expanding trade in goods

We examine the effect of entry by French firms into a new export market on the dynamics of their patents' citations received from that destination. Applying a difference-in-differences identification strategy with a stag...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Unravelling the complexities of sanctions

Sanctions have become a linchpin of foreign policy. But as they have grown more complex, understanding their true impact on targeted economies has become increasingly difficult, and evidence of their firm-level effects i...Read more...

Blog

Trade Talks:

Did responsible sourcing by multinationals help workers in poor countries? (podcast)

A series of industrial accidents that killed workers in the supply chains of multinational corporations triggered backlash by Western consumers. In response, many global companies committed to treat workers in poor count...Read more...

Blog

Trade Talks:

Industrial policy and the rise of Romania's Silicon Valley (podcast)

In 2001, Romania gave an income tax break to a select group of software programmers. Isabela Manelici explains how this particular industrial policy helped stem Romania's "brain drain" problem, transformed the country's ...Read more...

Blog

Vox Dev:

All aboard: The effects of port development

There are large potential gains to improving ports, but space constraints and other costs affect who benefits from port infrastructure, say Cesar Ducruet, Reka Juhasz, David Krisztian Nagy and Claudia Steinwender....Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Globalization and pandemics

We provide theory and evidence on the relationship between globalization and pandemics. Business travel facilitates trade and travel leads to human interactions that transmit disease. Trade-motivated travel generates an ...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Observing freedom's vanishing act

The political equilibrium in Hong Kong was fundamentally altered in June 2020, when the Chinese Communist Party began coercively suppressing all protest. Noam Yuchtman provides a first-hand account of watching civil libe...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Deep trade agreements: proliferation, provisions, impact

Modern trade agreements between countries contain a host of provisions beyond simple tariff reductions on traded products. Research by Holger Breinlich, Valentina Corradi, Nadia Rocha, Michele Ruta, Jo?o Santos Silva and...Read more...

Blog

Springer Nature Research Communities:

Towards Zero Waste: Segregation at Source Can Reduce Our Waste Footprint

Waste management is a key part of the UN Sustainable Development Goal 11 of making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable. Fjolla Kondirolli, Swati Dhingra and Stephen Machin outline the...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Globalization and market power

Economic theory suggests that the markup is a key measure of market power and that its relationship with trade is rich and complex. Trade liberalisation can reduce markups via a decline in the residual domestic demand bu...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Using machine learning to assess the impact of deep trade agreements

Modern preferential trade agreements contain a host of provisions that go beyond tariff liberalisation. By adapting techniques from the machine learning literature, this column develops data-driven methods for selecting ...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Financial crises as drivers of populism: a new channel

Financial crises have severe economic costs. This column shows that they also entail major political costs. It argues that the global financial crisis, and associated Great Recession, represents a watershed for populism ...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

Ukraine's accession to the European Union: what difference would it make?

Existing agreements between Ukraine and the EU have already promoted substantial trade flows. Accession would have bigger implications for freedom of movement of capital and workers - investment inflows and migration out...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Trade with nominal rigidities: understanding the unemployment and welfare effects of the China shock

Researchers examine how increased competition from China impacts the welfare of the US labour market....Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Imposing high tariffs on imported Russian gas: would it be effective?

As Russia's invasion of Ukraine continues and many call for a strengthening of sanctions, an alternative to a full energy embargo has been discussed in the form of European Union tariffs on imports of Russian gas. The In...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

Sanctions on Russia: what are the ramifications of this new trade war?

Following the invasion of Ukraine, Western sanctions have targeted Russia's trade, companies, individuals and financial sector. The measures, which are far more wide-ranging than those following the annexation of Crimea ...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Quantifying the full impact of country-specific policies on trade flows

Rebecca Freeman, Mario Larch, Angelos Theodorakopoulos and Yoto Yotov propose a solution to issues measuring country-specific impact using structural gravity models - a popular way to analyse the impact of trade policie...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

The globalisation backlash

As populist parties have surged across advanced democracies so, it seems, has a 'globalisation backlash'. This column provides descriptive evidence on the backlash, discusses its theoretical underpinnings within standard...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Inclusion in the workplace: how not to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory

Sitting at a focal point between east and west, Singapore has a nuanced and multi-layered cultural landscape that exemplify the importance of context for behavioural interventions to promote diversity and inclusion (D&I)...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

The impact of trade costs can be weak or strong - depending on how much countries trade

Many countries try to bring down trade costs by striking free trade agreements, forming currency unions or joining the WTO. But when trade costs fall, how much does trade increase? Natalie Chen and Dennis Novy explain th...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The backlash of globalization

We review the literature on the globalization backlash, seen as the political shift of voters and parties in a protectionist and isolationist direction, with substantive implications on governments' leaning and enacted p...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Corporate taxes: views of leading economists on profit-shifting, tax base and a global minimum rate

Romesh Vaitilingam reports on economists' responses to the IGM Forum poll on issues surrounding the G7 global deal on corporate taxes....Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Competition and pass-through on the Greek islands

A fundamental issue in economics is how firms deal with unexpected cost increases, perhaps arising from taxes, exchange rate fluctuations or rising input prices: what drives the extent to which they pass the costs throug...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

The differing effects of globalisation on trade versus migration

Better communications, enhanced transport links, integration agreements between governments, and other factors have all helped increase global economic interconnectedness over the past few decades. This column compares a...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

The distinctive character of policy-driven stock market jumps

When the stock market moves in a big way, journalists try to explain why. This column uses next-day newspaper accounts to characterise the drivers of more than 6,000 big daily moves ('jumps') across 16 national stock mar...Read more...

Journal article

European Economic Review:

Worker and firm responses to trade shocks: the UK-China case

We exploit the recent surge in Chinese export growth to study the effects of a trade shock on workers and firms in a foreign market, the UK, in the period 2000?2007. We find that individuals initially employed in sectors...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Trade protection along supply chains: the negative effects of tariffs on downstream sectors

In a world in which production processes are fragmented across countries, the effects of tariffs propagate along supply chains, with firms in downstream industries suffering from protection upstream. This column studies...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

The trade and welfare benefits of deep trade agreements

Deep trade agreements are widespread and have taken the world beyond tariff liberalisation in goods trade. As the importance of global supply chains and the services sector increased across the world, shallow tariff redu...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

How leading economists view antitrust in the digital economy

US and European experts discuss internet giants, and Google's dominance of search and operating practices, writes Romesh Vaitilingam...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Globalisation and pandemics: surprising interactions

Pandemics are only possible because of international travel. But perhaps surprisingly, in the absence of social distancing, a more globalised country will not necessarily suffer a worse outbreak. Pol Antras, Stephen Redd...Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19 blog:

How do globalisation and pandemics interact? Surprising insights from a new model

Pandemics are only possible because of international travel. But ? perhaps surprisingly ? in the absence of social distancing a more globalised country will not necessarily suffer a worse outbreak. Pol Antras (Harvard), ...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economics and Statistics:

Product mix and firm productivity responses to trade competition

We document how demand shocks in export markets lead French multi-product exporters to re-allocate the mix of products sold in those destinations. In response to positive demand shocks, French firms skew their export sal...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Perspectives:

The impact of the 2018 tariffs on prices and welfare

We examine conventional approaches to evaluating the economic impact of protectionist trade policies. We illustrate these conventional approaches by applying them to the tariffs introduced by the Trump administration dur...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Globalisation and its discontents

CEP's Trade Week brought together researchers and policy-makers to discuss the recent trend towards protectionism, its causes and directions for future policy. Josh De Lyon and Elsa Leromain report....Read more...

CentrePiece article

Trade and deskilling: how the post-referendum sterling depreciation hurt workers

The unexpected result of the Brexit referendum, working through the rapid depreciation of sterling, had a sizable negative impact on UK workers. New CEP work by Rui Costa, Swati Dhingra and Stephen Machin shows that the ...Read more...

Journal article

Review of International Economics:

Globalization and urban polarization

External trade affects the internal spatial structure of an economy, promoting growth in some cities or regions and decline in others. Internal adjustment to these changes has often proved to be extremely slow and painfu...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association:

Firm dynamics and residual inequality in open economies

Wage inequality between similar workers has been on the rise in many rich countries. Recent empirical research suggests that heterogeneity in firm characteristics is crucial to understand wage dispersion. Lower trade cos...Read more...

Journal article

Annual Review of Economics:

Networks and trade

Trade occurs between firms both across borders and within countries, and most trade transactions include at least one large firm with many trading partners. This article reviews the literature on firm-to-firm connections...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

From final goods to inputs: the protectionist effect of rules of origin

Recent decades have witnessed a surge of trade in intermediate goods and a proliferation of free trade agreements (FTAs). FTAs use rules of origin (RoO) to distinguish goods originating from member countries from those o...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of International Economics:

Working across time zones: exporters and the gender wage gap

This study argues that there is a systematic difference in the gender wage gap (GWG) between exporting firms and non-exporters. Exporters may require greater commitment from their employees, such as working particular ho...Read more...

Journal article

Quarterly Journal of Economics:

The global distribution of economic activity: nature, history, and the role of trade

We explore the role of natural characteristics in determining the worldwide spatial distribution of economic activity, as proxied by lights at night, observed across 240,000 grid cells. A parsimonious set of 24 physical ...Read more...

Journal article

Economic Journal:

Trade, firm selection and innovation: the competition channel

We study the welfare gains from trade in an economy with heterogeneous firms, variable markups and endogenous growth. Variable markups arise from oligopolistic competition, and cost-reducing innovation is the engine of l...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The costs and benefits of leaving the EU: trade effects

This paper estimates the welfare effects of Brexit, focusing on trade and fiscal transfers. We use a standard quantitative general equilibrium trade model with many countries and sectors and trade in intermediates, as in...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economic Studies:

Trade and inequality: from theory to estimation

While neoclassical theory emphasizes the impact of trade on wage inequality between occupations and sectors, more recent theories of firm heterogeneity point to the impact of trade on wage dispersion within occupations a...Read more...

Journal article

International Journal of Industrial Organization:

International aspects of merger policy: a survey

This paper surveys the literature on merger policy in open economies. We first adopt a reduced-form approach to derive general insights on the scope for conflict between national antitrust authorities and on the gains fr...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of International Economics:

Winners and losers from a commodities-for-manufactures trade boom

A recent boom in commodities-for-manufactures trade between China and other developing countries has led to much concern about the losers from rising import competition in manufacturing, but little attention on the winne...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Brexit: the impact on UK trade and living standards

For over two years, a CEP research team has been studying the likely impact on the living standards of UK households of a referendum vote to leave the European Union. The first of three reports summarised here focuses on...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Theory:

Assignment reversals: trade, skill allocation and wage inequality

The allocation of skilled labor across industries shapes inter-industry wage differences and wage inequality. This paper shows the ranking of industries by workforce skill differs between developed and developing countri...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Victorian internet: the trade impact of the transatlantic telegraph

The telegraph was the Victorian equivalent of today?s `big data?, helping firms to forecast future demand. Analysing such unique historical `experiments? helps understand how firms and markets respond when new technology...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Trapped Factors Model of Innovation

When will reducing trade barriers against a low wage country cause innovation to increase in high wage regions like the US or EU? We develop a model where factors of production have costs of adjustment and so are partial...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Goods Trade, Factor Mobility and Welfare

This paper extends a recent class of quantitative models of international trade to incorporate factor mobility within countries. We present a model-based decomposition of the variance of economic activity into the contri...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Managerial Incentives and Compensation in a Global Market

This paper embeds a principal-agent firm in an otherwise standard trade model a la Melitz (2003) to investigate the impact of globalization on the provision of managerial incentives and on the distribution of managerial ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Service Traders in the UK

We provide a novel set of stylized facts on firms engaging in international trade in services, using unique firm-level data on services exports and imports in the United Kingdom in 2000- 2005. Less than 10% of firms trad...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Protection and International Sourcing

We study the impact of import protection on relationship-specific investments, organizational choice and welfare. We show that a tariff on intermediate inputs can improve social welfare through mitigating hold-up problem...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Tax Cuts in Open Economies

A reduction in income tax rates generates substantial dynamic responses within the framework of the standard neoclassical growth model. The short-run revenue loss after an income tax cut is partly - or, depending on para...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Competing for Contacts: Network Competition, Trade Intermediation and Fragmented Duopoly

A two-sided, pair-wise matching model is developed to analyse the strategic interaction between two information intermediaries who compete in commission rates and network size, giving rise to a fragmented duopoly market ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Information Costs, Networks and Intermediation in International Trade

This paper presents a pairwise matching model with two-sided information asymmetry to analyse the impact of information costs on endogenous network building and matching by information intermediaries. The framework innov...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trust-Based Trade

Weak enforcement of international contracts can substantially reduce international trade. We develop a model where agents build reputations to overcome the difficulties that this institutional failure causes in a context...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Freedom Fries

Do firms choose inputs that minimize their cost of production, ignoring the attitudes of their owners and employees? We examine this question using an episode of worsening relations between the US and France: from Februa...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Can Comparative Advantage Explain the Growth of US Trade?

We present a dynamic comparative advantage model in which moderate reductions in trade costs can generate sizable increases in trade volumes over time. A fall in trade costs has two effects on the volume of trade. First,...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Globalization in History: A Geographical Perspective

This paper argues that a geographical perspectie is fundamental to understanding comparative economic development in the context of globalization. Central to this view is the role of agglomeration in productivity perform...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Globalization and the inequality of nations

A monopolistically competitive manufacturing sector produces goods used for final consumption and as intermediates. Intermediate usage creates cost and demand linkages between firms and a tendency for manufacturing agglo...Read more...