Person:
Saez, Sebastian
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Trade,
Competitiveness,
Regional integration,
Trade policy
Degrees
Departments
Macroeconomics, Trade, and Investment Global Practice
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
January 31, 2023
Biography
Sebastian Saez is a Lead Economist and Coordinator of The Trade and Competitiveness World Bank Program in India. Mr. Saez joined the World Bank Group in January, 2009. Before joining the WBG, he served as advisor to the Minister of Finance of Chile, and was involved in the GATT´s Uruguay Round negotiations. Subsequently, between 1994 and 1997 he was a member of the Chilean Mission to the World Trade Organization (WTO) where he served as Deputy Permanent Representative. In 1998, as an official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Chile he was Head of the Department FTAA - North America, where he was responsible for the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas negotiations. From August 2001 and July 2003 he was Head of the Department of Foreign Trade, Ministry of Economy of Chile. In this capacity, he participated in trade negotiations with European Union, Korea and the United States. In 2005, he joined the International Trade and Integration Division at UN-ECLAC. Since 2009 at the World Bank Group his work was focused on Trade in Services, regulatory matters and competitiveness. He is the co-author of Regulatory Assessment Toolkit: A Practical Methodology to Assess Services Trade and Investment Regulations, 2014 and Valuing Services in Trade: A Competitiveness Diagnostic Toolkit, 2014.
Publication Search Results
1 - 10 of 18
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Publication
Regulatory Assessment Toolkit : A Practical Methodology for Assessing Regulation on Trade and Investment in Services
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2014-03-12)Regulatory Assessment Toolkit: A Practical Methodology for Assessing Regulation on Services Trade and Investment provides guidance on how to assess and reform the regulatory policies of service trade industries. The toolkit can help government officials evaluate whether their regulatory framework addresses market failures, achieves public interest goals in an efficient manner, and promotes the development of an efficient domestic services market. Depending on the circumstances and the needs of the authorities, the toolkit can serve different purposes, including supporting regulatory reform, improving regulatory governance, negotiating and implementing trade agreements, and streamlining regulations to attract foreign investment. The Regulatory Assessment Toolkit will be of particular interest to policy makers and government officials from regulatory bodies, experts at development banks and donor agencies, and academics and researchers in the field of economic regulation. -
Publication
Valuing Services in Trade : A Toolkit for Competitiveness Diagnostics
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014)The Service Trade Competitiveness Diagnostic (STDC) Toolkit is part of a larger agenda of trade competitiveness work developed by the World Bank’s International Trade Unit in recent years. Services are a key input in countries’ trade competitiveness, as well as a new source of trade diversification, making it critical to understand what factors and main constraints matter most for services competitiveness. The Toolkit provides a framework, guidelines, and set of practical tools to conduct a thorough analysis and diagnostic of trade competitiveness in the services sector with a methodology that sheds light on a country’s ability both to export services and improve its export performance through policy change. This Toolkit is designed to be used in a modular way. Either a full country diagnostic can be undertaken or various parts of the toolkit can be used to address specific questions of interest, whether they pertain to existing services performance, the potential for expansion and growth in services trade, or policy options to increase competitiveness in services trade. The output of an STCD can be used to assess either the overall performance of a country’s services sector or the performance of individual sub-sectors. This Toolkit complements the analytical framework for trade in goods provided by the Trade Competitiveness Diagnostic Toolkit (World Bank, 2012), and allows policymakers and experts in developing countries to better integrate services into their overall trade strategies. In addition, it will also be of interest to international organizations and development practitioners in both policymaking institutions and academia. -
Publication
Exporting Services : A Developing Country Perspective
(World Bank, 2012)The book builds on previous research, including that by the World Bank, on trade in services. Such research includes analyses of the effect of liberalizing services in developing countries and sectoral studies on financial, transportation, telecommunication, and professional services, as well as on international negotiations. The conceptual framework for this book is based on the existing literature on the service sector (Francois and Hoekman 2010; Hoekman and Mattoo 2008). Recognizing the heterogeneity in both, economic structure of developing countries and their service exports, this book takes an eclectic approach to identifying successful strategies. Chapter two surveys the literature on determinants of service exports and presents an illustrative empirical model that synthesizes the available models on trade in services. Because trade data on services are scarce and have a number of weaknesses, rigorous econometric analysis has serious limits. The subsequent chapters of the book examine the determinants of trade in services through case studies of the experiences of countries with varying degrees of success. The book analyzes service export performance for the following countries: Brazil, Chile, the Arab Republic of Egypt, India, Kenya, Malaysia, and the Philippines. The countries were selected on the basis of their performance in global trade (especially trade in services), their regional role, and the availability of data and because they have consciously pursued policies to promote service exports. -
Publication
Trade in Services Negotiations : A Guide for Developing Countries
(World Bank, 2010)The aim of this book is to help policy makers, especially in the least developed countries, address the complexities of the organization, formulation, and implementation of trade-related reforms in the service sector. The book provides a conceptual framework for trade policy making and negotiation and practical tools that may be used to guide negotiations on policies that affect the trade and investment in services. The aim is not to be prescriptive, but to provide practical recommendations and tools that may be applied in the pursuit of negotiations on services, including consultations and regulatory audits. Negotiators often have little basic information regarding existing regulations and the purpose of these regulations. This problem is compounded by the difficulty of translating existing regulations into the terminology and concepts used in trade agreements. Different methodological approaches are needed to manage different sets of laws and regulations. This book offers a simple tool to help countries organize information to address these challenges. The book also provides practical examples and negotiation exercises that aim to enhance understanding of ways to use the conceptual framework and related tools. -
Publication
International Trade in Services : New Trends and Opportunities for Developing Countries
(World Bank, 2010)International trade in services also provides an assessment of how policy makers can further bolster their service industries by leveraging the changes prompted by technological advancements. The book provides policy recommendations that include the reduction of barriers to services trade across all sectors and the promotion of health- and environment-related development policies that should be promoted in parallel with a burgeoning services market. The first recommendation is considered the most important, because it focuses on the need to ensure trade openness, which helps ensure the access to services and promotes the quality of services provision through foreign and domestic competition. Moreover, the issue of temporary movement of labor is another focus of this book, given that it is one of the most important means of service exports for developing countries. This is an issue that is considered technically complex and politically sensitive because of its political and security implications. The book examines mechanisms that have been used by various countries to liberalize the temporary movement of persons and concludes that regardless of the negotiating forum- multilateral, regional, or bilateral-the policy making results on temporary movement of labor are, so far, modest and limited to a small range of categories. However, it proposes alternative ways to move forward that require further analysis by countries and relevant international organizations, including the World Bank. -
Publication
Firm Performance, Participation in Global Value Chains and Service Inputs: Evidence from India
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-10)This paper explores the relationship between the use of service inputs, participation in global value chains, and firm productivity. Services play the role of both an intermediate input in production and a coordinator. Using a detailed Indian firm-level data set from 1990–2017, the paper estimates the productivity premium associated with varying depths of global value chain integration and different intensities and types of services used in the production. The study finds that firms in global value chains have a productivity premium between 13 and 22 percent relative to domestic firms, with some variation based on the depth of global value chain integration and the sector to which the firm belongs. Both the type of service inputs used (composition of services) and the origin of services (whether sourced domestically or from abroad) matter for firm performance. While higher aggregate service input use (as captured by the share of expenditure on service inputs) is not necessarily associated with an increase in productivity, increased use of complex services and information technology services is associated with higher productivity. The use of imported services is associated with higher productivity. Moreover, firms that are more deeply integrated in global value chains benefit more from importing services. -
Publication
Integration in Global Value Chains — The Role of Service Inputs: Evidence from India
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-10)This paper investigates the relationship between the use of service inputs and integration in global value chains. Using macro and detailed firm-level data (for 1990–2017), the study documents the extent of India’s integration into global value chains. Older, larger, and more productive firms and firms with a higher leverage ratio are more likely to be deeply integrated into global value chains. Firms in the information technology services and electronics industry are more deeply integrated into global value chains, compared with textiles. Services are the engine for many global value chain industries as they help coordinate the different stages of production across geographical locations. The findings suggest that both the intensity of service usage as well as the composition or type of service used are important. Firms using service inputs, particularly complex services and information technology and information technology–enabling services intensively are typically more deeply integrated into global value chains. -
Publication
Streamlining Non-Tariff Measures : A Toolkit for Policy Makers
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2012)This volume is organized as follows. Chapter one discusses the newly revamped non-tariff measure (NTM) classification system, the data collection effort so far, and the key characteristics of the data. It also highlights the private-sector view that NTMs should support domestic firms' competitiveness across countries. Chapter two describes the analytics of an NTM review, step by step through the key questions, for example, is there a market failure, which market is affected, what are the costs of regulatory action vs. the risks of deregulation, and explains how to answer these questions and how to go about quantification when it is possible. Chapter three focuses on the institutional setup and key principles required to successfully pursue the streamlining of regulations. Since the mid-1990s, developed countries have introduced new regulatory approaches aimed at improving the quality of the decision-making process by enhancing both the analytical framework used by policy makers and the participation of interested parties in the regulatory process. Finally, chapters four and five provide practical examples of streamlining NTMs. Chapter four overviews selected experiences with tackling the trade regulatory agenda at both country and regional levels. Chapter five presents case studies on streamlining NTMs, including technical regulation and prohibition, particularly illustrating the analytics that may support the review process. Finally, NTM reviews should be seen as part of national competitiveness agendas rather than as concessions to trading partners. When NTMs are perceived by the domestic private sector as hampering access to key inputs, business regulatory reviews should naturally lead to NTM reviews. Joint use of the triangle of products will facilitate the adoption by governments of coherent national competitiveness strategies centered on the reduction of trade costs. -
Publication
Russian Federation: How Services Contribute to Competitiveness
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-09-19)Globalization is creating many new trade and growth opportunities, with services trade increasingly becoming an issue for export-oriented economies. Services are important to country trade strategies, because they represent activities in which countries may have a comparative advantage, and they are drivers of competitiveness for the whole economy. This paper uses data from the World Development Indicators, two new databases (the Export in Value-Added database from the Global Trade Analysis Project, and Trade in Services data), and firm-level data. The paper employs a wide range of indicators to analyze the trade competitiveness of the services sector in the Russian Federation. Since service exports are less than would be expected considering Russia's level of development, the study finds that the contribution of services to export diversification could be heightened significantly. The scale of Russian business services exports is relatively low, although exports of traditional services, like transport and travel, are performing well. Despite the relatively minor importance of exports of modern services, the category of other business services has in recent years been growing fast, and business services have strengthened their revealed comparative advantages. Yet Russia still has much potential for expanding trade in modern services. There is also potential to diversify services exports to other markets, such as France, Germany, Japan, and elsewhere in Asia, which today seems underexploited. Finally, although exports of direct services are low, services such as transport, distribution, finance, and other business services are making major contributions to other exports, in particular energy. -
Publication
Services for Trade Competitiveness: Country and Regional Assessments of Services Trade
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2019-06-04)Recognizing that services affect the ability of countries and their firms to compete on international markets, the World Bank’s Trade and Regional Integration Unit has developed an extensive work program to promote the performance of countries’ domestic services sectors, including services trade. Services for Trade Competitiveness presents selected applications of new methodologies that were developed to assess the competitiveness of countries’ services sectors, discern the types of barriers to services that exist in the regulatory environment, and identify the resulting policy implications. Its assessments are designed for a wide audience, including policy makers in developing countries and development practitioners in international organizations, policy-making institutions, and academia. The purpose of this book is to help developing countries make informed policy choices to increase their chances of benefiting from the increasing prominence of services in international trade.