Erik van der Marel
Email: erik.vandermarel@ecipe.org
Office: +32 (0) 2 289 1350 Mobile: +32 (0) 499 053 104
Areas of Expertise: EU Trade Agreements Services Digital Economy WTO and Globalization Russia & Eurasia

Erik van der Marel is a Senior Economist at ECIPE. His areas of expertise are in services trade and political economy of services trade policy, Russia’s trading patterns, plus total factor productivity (TFP) and regulation including trade policy in developing countries. His research has been concentrated on empirical issues such as analyzing patterns of services trade economics, productivity and comparative advantage, but also on trade policy such as regulation, the GATS, PTAs, and NTBs in developing countries.
Prior to his appointment at ECIPE, Erik was lecturing at the London School of Economics where he taught International Political Economy and The Political Economy of International Trade at post-graduate level. Before the LSE he was a Research Fellow at the Groupe d’Économie Mondiale (GEM) institute in Paris at Sciences-Po. In the past, Erik also gained various professional experiences as a consultant at the European Commission (DG Internal Market) OECD, APEC and as visiting researcher the World Bank. Furthermore, he has also worked for one year at the Euronext-NYSE stock exchange as a strategic research analyst.
Erik received his PhD in international economics from Sciences-Po Paris under the supervision of Professor Patrick Messerlin and Bernard Hoekman, specializing in links between regulation and productivity, comparative advantage in services, and the heterogeneous trade effects of services regulation.
His current work includes developing the Services Trade Competitiveness Diagnostic Toolkit for the World Bank’s Trade Department for which he also constructed empirically a tradability index for services for trade policy makers. Other recent trade policy work for the World Bank currently focuses on Bulgaria, Russia and Pakistan. Erik has been teaching trade at the ULB since 2014.
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New Globalization
Globalization Isn’t in Decline: It’s Changing
Globalization isn’t in decline; it is simply changing. Although the COVID-19 crisis has seen a dramatic decline in goods trade, investments and the movement of people, a new type of globalization is emerging. This “new globalization” is based on digital services, research and development, data, ideas, and other intangibles. This development has been going on for a while and has evolved more rapidly after the previous global financial crisis (GFC) in 2008-9....
ECIPE Working Papers
Shifting into Digital Services: Does a Crisis Matter and for Who?
How do trade patterns change after an external shock such as an economic crisis, and is this shift structural? This paper uses a Difference-in-Difference (DID) approach to investigate whether services trade became more digital after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2008. It finds that the GFC formed an independent break from the previous period that turned services trade to become more digital – although there are signs that this somewhat already happened...
DTE Project
Patterns of Trade Restrictiveness in Online Platforms: A First Look
This paper develops a digital platform restrictiveness index for 64 countries based on ECIPE’s Digital Trade Estimates (DTE) database and the Digital Trade Restrictiveness Index (DTRI). We identify specific restrictions that affect online platforms with a focus on online search, e-commerce and social media. The results show that both OECD and non-OECD countries show high levels of trade restrictions on online platforms. Moreover, some of the most restricted...
DTE Project
Do Data Policy Restrictions Inhibit Trade in Services?
This paper examines whether restrictive data policies impact trade in services over the internet. We have collected comparable information on a variety of policy measures that regulate data for a wide group of countries for the years 2006-2016. This information is compiled in a weighted index that assesses the restrictiveness of these countries’ data policies. We distinguish between policies regulating the cross-border movement of data and policies regulating the...
Media Mention
DTRI used in WTO’s 2020 World Trade Report on “Government policies to promote innovation in the digital age”
ECIPE's DTRI used in the analysis for the WTO World Trade Report...
Media Mention
DTRI mentioned in Pakistan’s Business Recorder
The DTRI mentioned as part of a World Bank report in Pakistan's Business...
Media Mention
Global Digital Trade 1: Market Opportunities and Key Foreign Trade Restrictions
Digital Trade Estimates Project Database used in USITC...
Media Mention
Digital technology diffusion: A matter of capabilities, incentives or both?
Digital Trade Restrictiveness Index used in OECD...
Article
A European industrial policy for services: the Single Market
Philipp Lamprecht, Erik van der Marel & Oscar Guinea write about Industrial Policy for...
Article
Productive services with the help of internet technologies
Erik van der Marel writes about productive services with the help of internet technologies on the ADBI's...
Article
The Cost of Data Protectionism
Erik van der Marel and Martina Ferracane write on...
Article
Data localisation in the EU: the threat from inside
Erik van der Marel opines in E-sharp on data localization measures and where to go from...
Book or Paper
Disentangling Data Flows: Inside and Outside the Multinational Company
Erik van der Marel contributes in a book in honour of Patrick Messerlin called "Trade in the 21st Century Back to the...
Book or Paper
Lessons from the pandemic for trade cooperation in digital services
Erik van der Marel contributes to the CEPR eBook on Revitalising Multilateralism in...
Book or Paper
Online Platform Restrictiveness
Erik van der Marel and Martina Ferracane publish on online platform trade restrictiveness in The World...
Book or Paper
Digital Technologies, Services and the Fourth Industrial Revolution
Erik van der Marel contributes to Working Paper that has been prepared as background for a short Policy Brief for the 2020 T20 Taskforce 1: Trade and...
Speech or Presentation
Digital Platforms & Digital Trade Restrictions
Erik van der Marel holds a Brown Bag Lunch seminar at the World Bank explaining the economic impacts of digital trade...
Speech or Presentation
Data Restrictiveness and Economic Impacts
Erik van der Marel holds a presentation at the Korea-US Policy Dialogue on digital trade restrictiveness and its impact on trade, productivity and...
Speech or Presentation
Digital Restrictiveness and its Economic Impacts
Erik van der Marel presents in the EUI World Trade Forum 2019 in...
Speech or Presentation
Third-country Impacts of FTAs: The Case of Services
Erik van der Marel comments on Kommerskollegium's study on third country impact of FTA regarding services....