While precise impact of Brexit on the EU/UK trade and investment agreements with third countries will depend primarily on the terms of the withdrawal agreement to be concluded between them, most scenarios suggest an extensive process of amendment of the text and/or commitments in multilateral and bilateral agreements.
... See More + At the multilateral level, the UK will remain a WTO Member, but will no longer be represented by the EU. The separation of the UK obligations from the current EU lists of concessions and schedules of commitments will require amendments that, particularly regarding subsidies and quotas, may lead to a broader renegotiation process requiring consensus of all interested WTO members. At the bilateral level, the status of current EU PTAs with regard to the UK and its trading partners remains uncertain: Some elements suggest that these PTAs may no longer be valid for the UK, or that, even if legally valid, they will no longer cover the relationship between the UK and the third country. Further, EU agreements focusing on goods only will no longer apply to the UK. For these agreements to continue to apply, the UK and the third country will need to amend some aspects of the text of the agreement as well as of the lists of commitments. Investment treaties concluded by the UK with third countries will remain valid, and no amendment is in principle necessary. Parties could require amendments to the text of the treaty, due to a fundamental change in circumstances. LDCs and developing countries who benefit from the EU GSP will continue under this regime for the remaining EU member, but that GSP framework will no longer be applicable to the UK. The UK may introduce a new GSP regime of its own. In all cases, third countries who consider that Brexit has diminished the value of their negotiated commitments have the opportunity to request compensation in sectoral commitments or changes in the text of the agreements, or ultimately terminate the agreement The process of amending the trade and investment agreements requires comprehensive knowledge of their trade and investment flows with the EU and the UK.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8010 MAR 20, 2017
This paper studies the impact of deep agreements on United Kingdom-European Union trade relations. A standard gravity model is applied to assess the effect that European Union membership had on the United Kingdom's trade.
... See More + The paper uses new information on the content of trade agreements to build a measure of "depth" based on the number of provisions the agreements cover. The analysis relies on information on goods, services, and value-added trade from the World Input Output Database. Deep trade agreements are found to increase goods and services trade by 42 percent, and value-added trade by 14 percent on average. European Union membership had a particularly strong effect on United Kingdom's services and global value chain trade. Because of its membership, the United Kingdom's services trade more than doubled, and the country's backward and forward participation in global value chains increased by more than 30 percent each. The paper uses these estimates to evaluate the future of United Kingdom-European Union trade under different scenarios. The findings show that United Kingdom-European Union trade declines under all scenarios, ranging between 6 and 28 percent for trade in value added. This drop is sharper (particularly for services and global value chain trade) the lower is the depth of the future arrangement relative to the depth of the European Union agreement. As trade flows adjust slowly to changes in trade costs, these effects are expected to emerge over time. But the trade-off between the depth of trade agreements and trade intensity will delimit policy choices going forward.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS7947 JAN 19, 2017
Financial consumer protection sets clear rules of conduct for financial firms regarding their retail customers. It aims to ensure that consumers: 1) receive information to allow them to make informed decisions, 2) are not subject to unfair or deceptive practices, and 3) have access to recourse mechanisms to resolve disputes.
... See More + Complementary financial literacy initiatives are aimed at giving consumers the knowledge and skills to understand the risks and rewards of using financial products and services-and their legal rights and obligations in using them. Clear rules of conduct for financial institutions, combined with programs of financial education for consumers, will increase consumer trust in financial markets and will support the development of these markets. International and regional non-government organizations are also playing an increasingly important role in financial consumer protection. The responsible finance forum lists financial consumer protection regulation and financial capability as two of the three pillars of the framework for responsible finance. This summary is not exhaustive but helps illustrate the many ongoing international initiatives that support financial consumer protection. All the initiatives are helpful in strengthening the global response to weaknesses in financial consumer protection. Nevertheless, still more could be done by civil society organizations, particularly those operating at a global level. The World Bank is also supporting the international dialogue on financial consumer protection through development of good practices based on country-level experience and ongoing technical assistance. The good practices provide a comprehensive diagnostic tool to help identify the consumer protection issues in all parts of the financial sector.
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Linking higher education finance and policy, referred to as strategic financing, is increasing in popularity throughout Central Europe and the Baltic Countries.
... See More + Strategic financing essentially implies that public funding mechanisms are informed by and aligned with specific higher education policy objectives. Governments are asking how the funding strategy can be more supportive of policy objectives. Can funding formulae, for instance, be modified strategically to help realize certain policy objectives? If a government is seeking to enroll more science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) students, for example, could allocating a premium to higher education institutions (HEIs) per STEM student help achieve the policy objective? Like many countries around the work, Central European and Baltic countries are exploring how different financing modalities can provide additional leverage in steering their higher education sector towards specific policy objectives. In recent years, many Central European and Baltic countries are facing common economic, socio-political, and demographic factors. These common challenges can broadly be categorized into three main themes: challenging economic environment; increasing European integration; and declining demographic trends. First, the region still faces fiscal constraints as it emerges from the global economic slowdown. Such economic trends have placed downward pressure on public higher education budgets and increased the call for collaboration between higher education and the labor market. Second, national higher education policies across Central Europe and the Baltic countries are impacted by a broader European policy environment, including the European Higher Education Area. Supranational initiatives, such as the EU’s Education and Training 2020 Strategy, Horizon 2020, and its Modernization Agenda for Higher Education, as well as the intergovernmental Bologna Process strongly influence national higher education policies. Third, a declining population in Europe is shrinking the number of working- and student-age people. After decades of growth in the higher education sector, the number of new students participating in higher education is slowly declining.
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This paper is the first one to show the effects of services regulations on downstream firms in the goods and services sectors in a multiple-country setting using firm-level data.
... See More + The study selected a group of countries that are economically relatively services-oriented and show varying degrees of services regulations over time, namely the European Union. The paper employs four alternative firm-level measures of total factor productivity that have recently been developed in the economics literature and provide robust conclusions. Overall, the results suggest that regulatory barriers in services have diverse effects on downstream manufacturing performance, depending on the type of regulatory measure in question. The policy variables are split into pure entry barriers and those that relate to the anti-competitive policies on the operations of the firm, which the paper calls conduct regulations. The latter appear to play the most important role in explaining downstream performance across services and goods firms. Furthermore, the results show that regulations matter significantly more in the cases when a country is institutionally weak, an industry is considered as relatively close to the technology frontier, or a firm is foreign owned.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS7919 DEC 15, 2016
Van Der Marel,Erik Leendert; Kren,Janez; Iootty De Paiva Dias,MarianaDisclosed
