Lucian Cernat

This Policy Brief looks at the latest trends in services trade and tries to show their importance, in its various manifestations, for virtually all countries in the world. The paper starts with a short history of trade in services across centuries. Fast forward to today’s realities, the paper uses the most comprehensive datasets documenting the latest trends in global trade in services by modes of supply, trying to fill a gap in trade policy analysis and...

Europe’s digital transition is starting to bear fruits. Europe’s economic landscape is becoming increasingly digital, with sectors like information and communication technology (ICT) capturing a growing share of EU GDP. This Policy Brief examines the impact of these economic shifts on Europe’s trade profile and the policies that the EU can pursue to support this transformation. Disclaimer: the views expressed herein are those of the author and do not...

Trade agreements are powerful drivers of global economic integration, leading to increased trade flows between countries. Usually, trade agreements are extensive documents with hundreds of provisions and different levels of enforceability. Are all these provisions useful, even those that are “best endeavours” and do not introduce legally binding obligations on trading partners? This policy brief proposes a new methodological approach to evaluate these effects....

This Policy Brief introduces the Gini Trade Index (GTI) as a new trade synthetic key performance indicator capable of capturing the different distribution of trade values across firm characteristics and across countries. The new indicator replicates the well-known features of the traditional Gini Index, a widely used metric for the skewness of several socioeconomic indicators, in particular income inequality. The Policy Brief calculates the Gini Trade Index for all...