To Örebro University

In this study the key elements of the WTO Doha Round are simulated and the main implications for international trade and national income are analysed. Based on negotiation information, three scenarios are designed. All scenarios encompass goods, services and agricultural liberalisation as well as trade facilitation. For goods liberalisation, a so-called Swiss formula is used to cut bound tariff rates. Agricultural tariffs are cut according to a tiered linear formula. Attention has been given to the modelling of trade facilitation. Indirect as well as direct trade transaction costs are modelled. For simulation of the services liberalisation quantitative estimates of indirect trade barriers are used. The simulation results show that all regions in the aggregation gain in the simulated Doha scenarios, with a particularly strong result for developing countries. A conservative estimate is that global income increases with 0.2–0.7 per cent of initial GDP, depending on the level of liberalisation. Trade facilitation contributes the most to these results, with increased market access for non-agricultural goods coming in second place. Overall, simulations indicate the importance of countries' own liberalisation for their national income gains, and the importance of a broad-based round.

a heterogeneous firm trade model. By exploiting a rich employer–employee panel for Sweden, we show that immigrants’ skills and lengths of stay strongly influence the association with firm trade. The link is stronger for smaller firms and for differentiated goods but similar across detailed product margins of trade. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that.immigrants facilitate trade by lowering information friction and by infusing trust into business. 

There are signs that manufacturing is becoming increasingly focused on services; this process is known as servicification. Despite suggestive evidence, large gaps remain in our knowledge regarding this process. This paper contributes to closing these gaps by discussing the phenomenon, arriving at some conjectures and examining them empirically. Comprehensive datasets at both the firm and enterprise group level are developed for Sweden. Changes in manufacturing during the period from 1997 to 2006 are analysed in depth. The results show that manufacturing has been servicifying substantially. On the input side, services and qualified services are increasingly characteristic of in-house activity. On the output side, manufacturing has been accounting for an increasing share of services in total sales and exports. Moreover, we show that diversification is much greater (almost 60% higher) when all activities in the manufacturing industry’s constituent enterprise groups are considered. The results imply that the practice of treating services and manufacturing separately – e.g., in trade policymaking – may be out-of-date. Finally, the findings illustrate the value of enterprise group-level data when studying structural economic changes.

Manufacturing firms have been increasingly focusing on services, a trend that is evident in their composition of input, in-house production and total sales. The services intensity of firms may affect their productivity and thereby their competitiveness abroad; services are also instrumental in connecting firms to foreign markets and can help them to differentiate their offerings from those of other firms. However, the relation between services and manufacturing exports has only been partially analysed in the previous literature. This study contributes to the field by discussing the role of services for firms and empirically testing a set of related conjectures. Export intensity is regressed on two services parameters, applying a fractional model to a rich panel of firms in Sweden in the period 2001-2007. The microeconometric results suggest that, after controlling for covariates and heterogeneity, service inputs affect a firms’ export capabilities: raising the proportion of services in in-house production yields higher export intensity on average. Furthermore, buying-in more services is associated with higher export intensity for firms in some industries. Overall, the study provides new firm-level evidence of the role of services as inputs in manufacturing.