Publication: Machine Learning in International Trade Research: Evaluating the Impact of Trade Agreements
Loading...
Published
2021-04
ISSN
Date
2021-04-19
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
Modern trade agreements contain a large number of provisions besides tariff reductions, in areas as diverse as services trade, competition policy, trade-related investment measures, or public procurement. Existing research has struggled with overfitting and severe multicollinearity problems when trying to estimate the effects of these provisions on trade flows. This paper builds on recent developments in the machine learning and variable selection literature to propose novel data-driven methods for selecting the most important provisions and quantifying their impact on trade flows. The proposed methods have the advantage of not requiring ad hoc assumptions on how to aggregate individual provisions and offer improved selection accuracy over the standard lasso. The analysis finds that provisions related to technical barriers to trade, antidumping, trade facilitation, subsidies, and competition policy are associated with enhancing the trade-increasing effect of trade agreements.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Breinlich, Holger; Corradi, Valentina; Rocha, Nadia; Ruta, Michele; Santos Silva, J.M.C.; Zylkin, Tom. 2021. Machine Learning in International Trade Research: Evaluating the Impact of Trade Agreements. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 9629. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/35451 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Digital Object Identifier
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Publication The Macroeconomic Implications of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Options(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29)Estimating the macroeconomic implications of climate change impacts and adaptation options is a topic of intense research. This paper presents a framework in the World Bank's macrostructural model to assess climate-related damages. This approach has been used in many Country Climate and Development Reports, a World Bank diagnostic that identifies priorities to ensure continued development in spite of climate change and climate policy objectives. The methodology captures a set of impact channels through which climate change affects the economy by (1) connecting a set of biophysical models to the macroeconomic model and (2) exploring a set of development and climate scenarios. The paper summarizes the results for five countries, highlighting the sources and magnitudes of their vulnerability --- with estimated gross domestic product losses in 2050 exceeding 10 percent of gross domestic product in some countries and scenarios, although only a small set of impact channels is included. The paper also presents estimates of the macroeconomic gains from sector-level adaptation interventions, considering their upfront costs and avoided climate impacts and finding significant net gross domestic product gains from adaptation opportunities identified in the Country Climate and Development Reports. Finally, the paper discusses the limits of current modeling approaches, and their complementarity with empirical approaches based on historical data series. The integrated modeling approach proposed in this paper can inform policymakers as they make proactive decisions on climate change adaptation and resilience.Publication South Africa’s Fragmented Cities: The Unequal Burden of Labor Market Frictions(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2026-01-08)Using high-resolution administrative, census, and satellite data, this paper shows that South African cities are characterized by spatial mismatches between where people live and where jobs are located, relative to 20 global peers. Areas within 5 kilometers of commercial centers have 9,300 fewer residents per square kilometer than expected, which is 60 percent below the global median. Poor, dense neighborhoods are most affected. In Johannesburg, a 10-percentile increase in distance from the nearest business hub corresponds to a 3.7-percentile drop in asset wealth (a proxy of household wellbeing) and 4.9-percentile drop in employment. In Cape Town, the declines are 4.0 and 3.7 percentiles, respectively. Employment is 87 percent lower in the poorest decile than the richest in Johannesburg and 61 percent lower in Cape Town. These findings suggest that South Africa’s spatial organization of people and economic activity constrains agglomeration and reinforces inequality. This methodology provides a scalable and standardized data-driven framework to analyze spatial accessibility and agglomeration frictions in complex, data-constrained urban systems.Publication The Evolution of Local Participatory Democracy in Nepal(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-11-05)Nepal is, according to its constitution, among the world’s most decentralized countries, with a long and complex tradition of local-level public participation. This paper traces the evolution of Nepal’s modern participatory institutions, examining the extent to which they are “induced” by external interventions versus being “organically” rooted in indigenous practices. The paper identifies three broad phases: an initial focus on participation in project implementation; a subsequent phase that expanded citizen engagement; and a third phase of citizen empowerment, culminating in the 2015 federal constitution, which granted unprecedented local autonomy. The analysis yields five key findings. First, over the past 50 years, successive reforms have progressively expanded opportunities for citizens to influence local decision-making. Second, these reforms have integrated traditional participatory mechanisms into formal institutions of local government. Third, although central-level initiatives exist, most participatory platforms continue to operate at the local level. Fourth, the federal constitution has created a new landscape of local democracy, embedding autonomy and accountability. Fifth, although they are still valued in many ethnic and territorial communities, traditional participatory practices are gradually disappearing. The paper concludes by offering policy recommendations to help donor agencies and governments strengthen Nepal’s democratic trajectory. It argues that effective interventions should build on Nepal’s deep participatory traditions while recognizing the constitutional reality of far-reaching local autonomy.Publication Institutional Capacity for Policy Implementation: An Analytical Framework(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2026-01-07)State capacity is an important prerequisite for policy implementation, yet at the country level it is difficult to measure, assess, and reform. This paper proposes a focus on institutional capacity: the ability of public institutions to implement the specific policy mandates for which they are responsible. Based on a review of existing literature, the paper defines the different dimensions that compose institutional capacity and groups them into two cross-cutting categories: organizational dimensions (personnel, financial resources, information systems, and management practices) and governance dimensions (transparency, independence, and accountability). The paper proposes measures for organizational and governance dimensions using existing data, shows intra-institutional variation of these measures within countries, and discusses how new data could be collected for better measurement of these concepts. Finally, the paper illustrates how the framework can be used to diagnose the sources of common problems related to weak policy implementation.Publication Closing the Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship: Overcoming Challenges in Law and Practice for Female Entrepreneurs(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2026-01-07)Despite significant strides toward gender equality, women around the world continue to encounter systemic obstacles that hinder their entrepreneurial success. This paper systematically reviews the literature on the barriers female entrepreneurs face and the solutions proposed to overcome these challenges. It discusses institutional factors, financial factors, human capital factors, and social and cultural factors. The literature overview is complemented by a series of stylized facts that illustrate how overcoming some of these existing barriers is correlated with improved women’s entrepreneurship and female labor force participation, drawing on the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law database as well as the World Bank’s Enterprise Surveys. The findings underscore the need for creating an enabling environment where women can thrive as entrepreneurs.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Handbook of Deep Trade Agreements(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020-07-08)Deep trade agreements (DTAs) cover not just trade but additional policy areas, such as the international flows of investment and labor, and the protection of intellectual property rights and the environment. Their goal is integration beyond trade, or deep integration. DTA rules influence how countries transact, invest, work, and, ultimately, develop. The rules and commitments in DTAs should be informed by evidence and shaped by development priorities rather than international power or domestic politics. An impediment to this goal is that data and analysis on trade agreements have not captured the new dimensions of integration. Little effort has been made to identify the content and consequences of DTAs. This Handbook takes a step towards filling this gap in our understanding of international economic law and policy. It presents detailed data and analysis on the content of the policy areas most frequently covered in DTAs, focusing on the stated objectives, substantive commitments, and other aspects such as transparency, procedures, and enforcement. Each chapter, authored by lead experts in their respective fields, explains in detail the methodology used to collect the information and provides a first look at the evidence by policy area.Publication A General Equilibrium Assessment of the Economic Impact of Deep Trade Agreements(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-04)This paper explores the economic impacts of preferential trade agreements, focusing on the provisions they contain, beyond phasing out tariffs. Clustering 278 preferential trade agreements based on 906 provisions grouped into 18 policy areas, three clusters are obtained for which a trade elasticity to preferential trade agreement is estimated using structural gravity. A series of full general equilibrium counterfactual situations for endowment economies is simulated, revealing the economic impacts of deepening existing trade agreements and signing new ones—that is, the intensive and extensive margins of preferential trade agreements. The paper illustrates the method with a general deepening of existing preferential trade agreements worldwide. Focusing on the examples of the Latin America and the Caribbean and East Asia and Pacific regions, the paper shows that deepening preferential trade agreements leads to higher trade and welfare effects than signing new ones.Publication The Evolution of Deep Trade Agreements(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06)This paper presents new data on the content of preferential trade agreements. The data contain detailed information on the 18 policy areas most frequently covered in preferential trade agreements, focusing on the stated objectives, substantive commitments, and other aspects such as transparency, procedures, and enforcement. Several new stylized facts emerge: (i) preferential trade agreements have reduced trade-weighted average tariff rates to less than 5 percent for more than two-thirds of countries; (ii) the number of commitments in preferential trade agreements has increased over time, particularly since the 2000s and in areas aiming at facilitating flows of services, goods, and capital; (iii) deepening commitments have been accompanied by an increase in regulatory requirements, namely on enforcement; (iv) developing countries tend to have fewer commitments in preferential trade agreements, with larger gaps in areas such as labor and the environment; and (v) preferential trade agreements are more similar within blocs, but similarity can be significant even across blocs. The paper also discusses the challenges of quantification of preferential trade agreements "depth" and its effects and proposes a research agenda for future work on trade agreements.Publication The Economic Impact of Deepening Trade Agreements(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2023-03-03)This paper explores the economic impacts of preferential trade agreements, conditional on their level of ambition. It clusters 278 agreements, encompassing 910 provisions over 18 policy areas and estimates the trade elasticity for the different clusters. These elasticities are used in a series of general-equilibrium counterfactual situations for endowment economies, revealing that deepening existing agreements (the intensive margin of regional integration) could boost world trade by 3.9 percent and world GDP by 0.9 percent. The expected gains from deepening agreements within or across regions vary depending on the initial depth of agreements and the size of regional markets.Publication Deep Trade Agreements and Global Value Chains(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-06)Preferential trade agreements have become deeper over time, often encompassing policy areas that go beyond traditional trade policy, such as investment, competition, and intellectual property rights protection. In the literature, a prominent argument why countries sign "deep" agreements is to promote and facilitate the operation of global value chains. This paper exploits a new data set on the content of trade agreements and data on trade in value added and in parts and components, to quantify the impact of the depth of trade agreements on bilateral cross-border production linkages. The results show that adding a policy area to a trade agreement increases the domestic value added of intermediates (forward global value chain linkages) and the foreign value added of intermediates (backward global value chain linkages) by 0.48 and 0.38 percent, respectively. At the sectoral level, the positive impact of deep trade agreements is higher for higher value-added industries, suggesting that deep agreements help countries to integrate in industries with higher levels of value added. For a larger sample of countries and years, the results confirm that an additional provision in a trade agreement increases bilateral trade in parts and components by 0.3 percent. The content of trade agreements also matters for global value chain integration, but the impact varies by income group. Provisions outside the current mandate of the World Trade Organization (investment and competition policy) drive the effect of trade agreements on North-South trade in parts and components. Provisions under the current World Trade Organization mandate (tariff reduction and customs facilitation) drive the effect of trade agreements on South-South trade in parts and components.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication The Worldwide Governance Indicators(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-11-07)This paper provides an overview of the data sources and aggregation methodology for the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI). The WGI report six aggregate governance indicators measuring Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption in a sample of 214 economies over the period 1996–2023. The aggregate indicators combine information from 35 different existing data sources, capturing subjective perceptions of the quality of various dimensions of governance reported by experts and survey respondents worldwide. The paper briefly discusses how to use reported margins of error when interpreting cross-country and over-time differences in the aggregate indicators. The paper also updates and extends earlier analysis on three key issues relating to the WGI methodology: (a) the effect of correlated perception errors, (b) the robustness of the aggregate indicators to alternative weighting schemes, and (c) the existence on trends in global averages of governance.Publication Is Pumped Storage Hydroelectric Power Right for Vietnam?(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-10-24)The ability of pumped storage hydroelectric power (PSP) to supply large amounts of electricity at a moment’s notice provides a strong complement to the natural variability of wind and solar generation, potentially easing the integration of renewables into Vietnam’s burgeoning power system. But the availability of relatively inexpensive off-peak generation for pumping is a central part of the economics of PSP. In today’s Vietnam, cheap off-peak power may be hard to come by.Publication Digital Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-03-13)All African countries need better and more jobs for their growing populations. "Digital Africa: Technological Transformation for Jobs" shows that broader use of productivity-enhancing, digital technologies by enterprises and households is imperative to generate such jobs, including for lower-skilled people. At the same time, it can support not only countries’ short-term objective of postpandemic economic recovery but also their vision of economic transformation with more inclusive growth. These outcomes are not automatic, however. Mobile internet availability has increased throughout the continent in recent years, but Africa’s uptake gap is the highest in the world. Areas with at least 3G mobile internet service now cover 84 percent of Africa’s population, but only 22 percent uses such services. And the average African business lags in the use of smartphones and computers as well as more sophisticated digital technologies that catalyze further productivity gains. Two issues explain the usage gap: affordability of these new technologies and willingness to use them. For the 40 percent of Africans below the extreme poverty line, mobile data plans alone would cost one-third of their incomes—in addition to the price of access devices, apps, and electricity. Data plans for small- and medium-size businesses are also more expensive than in other regions. Moreover, shortcomings in the quality of internet services—and in the supply of attractive, skills-appropriate apps that promote entrepreneurship and raise earnings—dampen people’s willingness to use them. For those countries already using these technologies, the development payoffs are significant. New empirical studies for this report add to the rapidly growing evidence that mobile internet availability directly raises enterprise productivity, increases jobs, and reduces poverty throughout Africa. To realize these and other benefits more widely, Africa’s countries must implement complementary and mutually reinforcing policies to strengthen both consumers’ ability to pay and willingness to use digital technologies. These interventions must prioritize productive use to generate large numbers of inclusive jobs in a region poised to benefit from a massive, youthful workforce—one projected to become the world’s largest by the end of this century.Publication Services Liberalization and GVC Participation(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-06)Participation in global value chains is a key element in the industrialization strategies of many developing nations. This paper investigates the role of services liberalization in promoting participation in global value chains. Using the gravity framework, it examines the impact of services trade agreements on gross trade and global value chain trade (backward and forward participation) in goods. It finds that services trade agreements promote both, but especially global value chain trade, although the effects are heterogeneous: the impact is greater for developing nation exporters. Moreover, services agreements that allow the export of services without local presence (non-establishment rights) are particularly important in fostering participation in global value chains.Publication Heterogeneous Impacts of SPS and TBT Regulations(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-06)This paper estimates the impacts of regulating the use of sanitary and phytosanitary and technical barriers to trade measures through preferential trade agreements on exports of firms in Chile, Colombia, and Peru along the firm size spec trum. The analysis exploits novel data from the World Bank Deep Trade Agreements database and customs covering the universe of exporting firms in each country over 1996–2015. The paper uses a firm-product gravity equation with a stringent set of fixed effects and controls for the overall depth of the preferential trade agreements and product-specific bilateral tariffs. The findings show that firms’ exports increase significantly in destination markets with preferential trade agreements, including a larger number of sanitary and phytosanitary and technical barriers to trade provisions, and the effect is stronger for smaller firms. Provisions for the harmonization of sanitary and phytosanitary regulations in preferential trade agreements also have greater benefits for the exports of smaller firms, and so do preferential trade agreements, including stronger transparency provisions for sanitary and phytosanitary and technical barriers to trade regulations. The results are robust to dropping larger exporters and highly concentrated export sectors to address endogeneity. The benefits of sanitary and phytosanitary and technical barriers to trade provisions are mainly driven by sectors with more heavily-regulated products. Entry into new product markets and increases in export quality partly explain the rising exports of smaller firms. Finally, the estimated impacts are similar regardless of the income level of the preferential trade agreement partners.