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Brexit means that UK exporters of services now face more red tape and fewer opportunities....Read more...
Danyal Arnold, Shania Bhalotia and Swati Dhingra
21 October 2025
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...
Keith Head, Julian Hinz, Isabelle Mejean, Emanuel Ornelas and Moritz Schularick
27 July 2025
Amid geopolitical shocks, the EU is revisiting its industrial strategy. However, traditional metrics often paint a misleading picture of Europe's underlying strength. This column uses a new approach to measure the EU's r...Read more...
Filippo Di Mauro, Marco Matani and Gianmarco Ottaviano
25 June 2025
How should UK exporters react to the tariffs imposed by President Trump? While some may start planning to increase production in the United States to avoid the tax, others whose US customers are less price-sensitive may ...Read more...
Catherine Thomas
20 June 2025
Headlines around Trump's sweeping tariffs have focused on trade wars, inflation and the geopolitical fallout. But a more profound shift is taking place, argues Viet Nguyen-Tien. Rather than restoring American jobs, these...Read more...
Viet Nguyen-Tien
10 June 2025
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...
Andres Rodriguez-Clare, Mauricio Ulate and Jose P Vasquez
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...
David Atkin, Laura Boudreau, Rafael Dix-Carneiro, Amit Khandelwal, Isabela Manelici, Brian McCaig, Pamela Medina, Ameet Morjaria, Luigi Pascali, Heitor Pellegrina, Bob Rijkers and Meredith Startz
27 February 2025
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...
Amit Khandelwal, Isabela Manelici and Arvind Subramanian
17 December 2024
This briefing summarises the evidence about how leaving the European Union (EU) has affected UK trade. Overall, Brexit has had a negative effect on UK trade. But, so far, this effect has been smaller than economists expe...Read more...
Dennis Novy, Thomas Sampson and Catherine Thomas
17 June 2024
The vision of post-Brexit Britain was one of international trade deals that would propel the country into a new era of prosperity. That vision of "Global Britain" is now dead. Thomas Sampson argues that the only viable a...Read more...
Thomas Sampson
16 February 2024
Supply chain disruptions are routinely blamed for things ranging from elevated inflation to shortages of medical equipment in the pandemic. But how should exposure to foreign supply chains be measured? Using a global inp...Read more...
Richard E. Baldwin, Rebecca Freeman and Angelos Theodorakopoulos
29 November 2023
After nearly half a century of EU membership, Britain needs a trade strategy. The stakes are high: such a strategy shapes what families and firms buy from abroad, and what gets produced domestically; influences our jobs,...Read more...
Shania Bhalotia, Swati Dhingra, Emily Fry and Sophie Hale
15 June 2023
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, João Santos Silva and...Read more...
Holger Breinlich, Valentina Corradi, Nadia Rocha, Michele Ruta, João Santos Silva and Tom Zylkin
21 February 2023
To limit the funding of Russia's continued aggravation towards Ukraine and its subsequent impact on soaring energy prices, the G7 countries plan to impose a price cap on purchases of Russian oil and related products. Man...Read more...
Romesh Vaitilingam
27 September 2022
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...
8 July 2022
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...
17 May 2022
Romesh Vaitilingam reports on the views of leading economists concerning the likely economic consequences of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the responses by the international community....Read more...
10 March 2022
How should multilateral trade policy be designed in a world in which countries differ in terms of market access and technology, and firms with market power differ in terms of productivity? We answer this question in a mo...Read more...
Antonella Nocco, Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano and Matteo Salto
1 September 2019
This paper studies the origins and consequences of international technology gaps. I develop an endogenous growth model where R&D efficiency varies across countries and productivity differences emerge from firm-level tech...Read more...
10 June 2019
We study how a preferential trade agreement (PTA) affects international sourcing decisions, aggregate productivity and welfare under incomplete contracting and endogenous matching. Contract incompleteness implies underin...Read more...
Grant Bickwit, Emanuel Ornelas and John L. Turner
31 October 2018
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...
Paola Conconi, Manuel García-Santana, Laura Puccio and Roberto Venturini
1 August 2018
There is a growing recognition that for developed economies, like the UK, tariff-free market access is just one of a number of measures that ease cross-border trade flows. Modern trade agreements go beyond tariff reducti...Read more...
Swati Dhingra, Rebecca Freeman and Eleonora Mavroeidi
13 March 2018
This paper explores the impact of immigrants on the imports, exports and productivity of service-producing firms in the U.K. Immigrants may substitute for imported intermediate inputs (offshore production) and they may i...Read more...
Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano, Giovanni Peri and Greg C. Wright
6 March 2018
In recent years, researchers and policymakers have been able to use sophisticated databases to provide insightful economic analysis. The increasing variety of available microeconomic databases and the improvement in the ...Read more...
Giorgio Barba Navaretti, Matteo Bugamelli, Emanuele Forlani and Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano
26 January 2016
Two notable features of globalisation are the growth of immigration and the growth of international trade in services. Exploring links between these phenomena, Gianmarco Ottaviano, Giovanni Peri and Greg Wright find that...Read more...
6 November 2015
