David Henig

Services constitute at least a quarter of total trade. Between 2009 and 2019 global services trade increased by nearly 50%, compared to 18% for goods trade. Yet it is rarely taken as seriously as goods in global trade policy discourse. This is a problem when making the case for...

Free Trade Agreements between two or more countries or parties have been the centrepiece of international trade policy since the formation of the World Trade Organisation 25 years ago. Since 1995, no major round of multilateral trade liberalisation has been concluded, but there has been a sharp rise in the number of bilateral trade agreements. While some of these agreements have real consequences for trade in services and some administrative rules for trade, most...

China is now the world’s leading manufacturer, with goods exports rising from $63 billion in 1990 to $2.5 trillion in 2018. The popular assumption is that everything is now made in China, and that falling manufacturing employment in the EU and US is due to this. The assumption is wrong. China is the world’s largest goods exporter, but other countries have also experienced increases. One reason is that China is also the world’s second largest importer of...

In the last 25 years global value chains have come to dominate global trade in a way surprisingly little discussed or understood. To meet the policy challenges of today and the future we need to understand the key characteristics of this new global trade and how they came about. The OECD estimate around 70% of total trade takes place in global value chains. Using their definition as where “the different stages of the production process are located across...