Economic Governance, Regulation and Services Trade Liberalization

Many agreements to liberalize trade in services tend to be limited in scope. Concerns about possible negative regulatory consequences of services liberalization is one reason for this. In this paper we provide quantitative estimates of the impact of governance quality on the magnitude of the potential productivity gains of external services trade liberalization, and, in the context of the EU, their distribution across member states. Our findings suggest that greater effort to design trade agreements with a view to improving economic governance would benefit both the EU as well as its trading partners. There is significant scope to incorporate elements of the approaches that have been used in the EU single market context into external trade agreements, and to use the latter to further the realization of a single EU market for services.