Services procurement under the WTO’s agreement on government procurement: whither market access?

This paper studies the government procurement of services from foreign suppliers by conducting a statistical analysis of data submitted by Japan and Switzerland to the WTO's Committee on Government Procurement. Using several metrics, the paper examines whether the WTO’s Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA) has led to greater market access for foreign suppliers in services procurement. Our results indicate that despite the GPA, the proportions of services contracts awarded to foreigners have declined over time for both countries and that in the absence of this decline, the value of services contracts awarded to foreign firms would have been more than 15 times higher in the case of Japan and nearly 68 times more in the case of Switzerland. We also find that for the same services categories, the Japanese government is not purchasing as much from abroad as its private sector is importing from the rest of the world, a finding that further points to the home-bias in that government's public purchase decisions.Services, public procurement, GPA, Japan, Switzerland

Services growth and convergence: Getting India’s states together

India’s success story in services is well documented at the national level, but similar literature does not exist for India’s states. In this paper, we bridge this gap in research by looking at India’s services growth at the sub-national level and in doing so, also challenge existing literature by arguing that this growth has positive implications for income distribution. The first interesting finding is that even as per capita income is not converging across India’s states, per capita services are and we provide evidence for this both in terms of traditional measures of sigma- and beta-convergence and more recent panel unit root tests. Secondly, not only is external demand an important determinant of services value added at the state level, but this demand also emanates from all over the country rather than being concentrated in the neighbouring or richer states. This suggests that the benefits from services growth are being distributed more widely than may be perceived.Services, India, states, growth, convergence, demand

Reflections on the Preferential Liberalization of Services Trade

This paper takes stock of the forces that lie behind the recent rise of preferential agreements in services trade. Its initial focus is with a number of distinguishing features of services trade that sets it apart from trade in goods and shapes trade liberalization and rule-making approaches in the services field. The paper then documents the nature, modal and sectoral incidence of the trade and investment preferences spawned by PTAs in services. It does so with a view to addressing the question of how “preferential” is the preferential treatment of services trade? Finally, the paper addresses a number of considerations arising from attempts to multilateralize preferential access and rule-making in services trade.Services, trade in services, preferential trade agreements, General Agreement on Trade in Services, multilateral trading system

How much do agreements matter for services trade?

With an increasing number of Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) covering trade in services, we explore the impact of PTAs on services trade. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper in this literature that endogenizes the impact of services preferentialism in estimating the trade effect and also looks at its anticipation effects. We also add to this literature by distilling the trade effect of PTAs into that emanating from services and “goods only” agreements and further confirm complementarities between the two. Our results suggest a trade effect of 15% from having a services accord alone while the total incremental impact of a “goods only” agreement is found to be 7.6%. The services trade effect is accentuated to 59.7% once anticipation effects of services accords are included and such analysis also suggests that services agreements seem to have a significant “announcement effect.

"New" econometric evidence for the Baldwin-Richardson (1972)/Miyagiwa (1991) theoretical predictions in government procurement

Baldwin and Richardson (1972) and Miyagiwa (1991) laid out the conditions under which a home-bias in public procurement is rendered ineffective as a protectionist device. Since then there has been little empirical work on this subject. In this paper, we bridge this gap by building a new dataset from WTO notifications on domestic and foreign purchases by Japanese and Swiss governments at the sector level over 1990-2003 and use it to test the BRM theoretical predictions. Significantly, our empirical results support these theoretical predictions

How much do agreements matter for services trade?

With an increasing number of Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) covering trade in services, we explore the impact of PTAs on services trade. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper in this literature that endogenizes the impact of preferentialism in estimating the trade effect. We also add to this literature by distilling the trade effect of PTAs into that emanating from services and “goods only” agreements and further confirm complementarities between the two. Moreover, we study these relationships disaggregated by the economic status of the partner countries and by the reciprocity of commitments. Our results suggest trade effects of 11.6 – 12.7% from having a services accord alone. They also reveal that the underlying services trade between countries has been driven as much by IRS as by factor differences and that asymmetric trade alliance between North-South partners has been successful in fostering inter-industry trade

Services procurement under the WTO’s agreement on government procurement: whither market access?

This paper studies the government procurement of services from foreign suppliers by conducting a statistical analysis of data submitted by Japan and Switzerland to the WTO's Committee on Government Procurement. Using several metrics, the paper examines whether the WTO’s Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA) has led to greater market access for foreign suppliers in services procurement. Our results indicate that despite the GPA, the proportions of services contracts awarded to foreigners have declined over time for both countries and that in the absence of this decline, the value of services contracts awarded to foreign firms would have been more than 15 times higher in the case of Japan and nearly 68 times more in the case of Switzerland. We also find that for the same services categories, the Japanese government is not purchasing as much from abroad as its private sector is importing from the rest of the world, a finding that further points to the home-bias in that government's public purchase decisions

Exploring foreign market access in government procurement

Using unexplored Japanese and Swiss public procurement data over 1990-2003, we examine the effect of macroeconomic, political economy, procurement-specific and domestic policy factors on governments’ sourcing decisions. We also provide for an empirical test of Baldwin's (1970, 1984) "neutrality proposition" and for the effectiveness of the WTO's Uruguay Round Agreement on Government Procurement (URGPA) in increasing foreign market access. Our results suggest the importance of the magnitude of procurement demand, domestic firm attributes and unobserved sector-specific heterogeneity in these governments' purchases from abroad. However, the expected impact of traditional macroeconomic variables and political budget cycles does not come through in our results. Public and private sector imports do not offset each other in our analyses for Japan and only selectively for Switzerland. Finally, membership of the GPA is only found to increase the value of foreign procurement in Switzerland, though it seems to increase the import demand for contracts in both countries

Examining responsiveness of India’s trade flows to exchange rate movements

Determinants of trade flows have always attracted researchers. In this paper, we model monthly trade flows in India over January 2000 – December 2007 in a bid to gauge their responsiveness to exchange rate movements. Capital account and overall BOP surplus have led the Indian Rupee (INR) to appreciate and forex reserves to accumulate. In so far as the RBI intervenes to stem this forex accretion by the net purchase of USD, it puts further pressure on the INR to appreciate. It therefore becomes important to study the response of the current account to these changes in the exchange rate. We employ standard empirical estimations of India’s export supply and import demand functions using data from the Reserve Bank of India. We also assess the short-term dynamics of these trade flows through error correction models. Finally, we estimate vector auto regression models to gauge the extent of contemporaneous interaction between trade flows and the explanatory variables in the system

Exploring foreign market access in government procurement

Using unexplored Japanese and Swiss public procurement data over 1990-2003, we examine the effect of macroeconomic, political economy, procurement-specific and domestic policy factors on governments’ sourcing decisions. We also provide for an empirical test of Baldwin's (1970, 1984) "neutrality proposition" and for the effectiveness of the WTO's Uruguay Round Agreement on Government Procurement (URGPA) in increasing foreign market access. Our results suggest the importance of the magnitude of procurement demand, domestic firm attributes and unobserved sector-specific heterogeneity in these governments' purchases from abroad. However, the expected impact of traditional macroeconomic variables and political budget cycles does not come through in our results. Public and private sector imports do not offset each other in our analyses for Japan and only selectively for Switzerland. Finally, membership of the GPA is only found to increase the value of foreign procurement in Switzerland, though it seems to increase the import demand for contracts in both countries