Documents Mattoo, Aaditya 7 results

"This paper presents evidence on the determinants of cross-border mergers and acquisitions in services sectors. It develops a stylized model of mergers and acquisitions that predicts that the incidence of merger and acquisition deals depends, inter alia, on the target economy's size, industrial structure and investment policies, as well as on bilateral transactions costs. These predictions are examined with bilateral merger and acquisition flow data and detailed information on policy barriers from a new database of restrictions on services investment. The analysis finds that: (1) geographical factors affect mergers and acquisitions in services and manufacturing similarly but cultural factors affect mergers and acquisitions in services more than in manufacturing. (2) Controlling for these bilateral factors, restrictive investment policies reduce the probability of merger and acquisition inflows but this negative effect is mitigated in countries with relatively large shares of manufacturing and (to a lesser extent) services in gross domestic product. The same results hold for the number of merger and acquisition deals received. These findings suggest that the impact of policy is state-dependent and related to the composition of gross domestic product in the target economy."

"The competitiveness of firms in open economies is increasingly determined by access to low-cost and highquality producer services - telecommunications, transport and distribution services, financial intermediation, etc. This paper discusses the role of services in economic growth, focusing in particular on channels through which openness to trade in services may increase productivity at the level of the economy as a whole, industries and the firm. We explore what recent empirical work suggests could be done to enhance comparative advantage in the production and export of services and how to design policy reforms to open services markets to greater foreign participation in a way that ensures not just greater efficiency but also greater equity in terms of access to services."

"Little progress has been made since the creation of the WTO on expanding and deepening the coverage of services liberalization commitments. This paper identifies and discusses five hypotheses that may explain the absence of dynamism: (i) technological changes allowing ever more services to be traded cross-border unaffected by policy; (ii) strong incentives to pursue liberalization on an autonomous basis (unilaterally); (iii) perceptions that bilateral or regional cooperation are a good substitute for the WTO; (iv) standard political-economy factors, such as adjustment costs and resistance by incumbents to erosion of rents; and (v) concerns that the WTO will affect the ability of regulators to enforce national norms. We argue that all of these explanations play a role, and that some of these factors significantly impede the scope for reciprocal exchanges of ‘concessions' - the engine of WTO negotiations."

"Services play a role in global value chains in many ways, similar to goods. But services deserve special attention because of how they are transacted, how they affect downstream sectors, how they are regulated, and how international cooperation can contribute to integrating national markets. Databases on trade in value added, which cover only cross-border transactions in services, reveal a high and growing share of services in trade in value added across countries and industries. Although international transactions in services that take place through foreign investment are difficult to measure, their economic impact can be estimated. The resulting improved access to financial, communications, and transport services facilitates the emergence of global value chains, enhances downstream manufacturing firms' productivity, and shifts the pattern of comparative advantage toward sectors intensive in these services. Despite significant unilateral liberalization, service markets in many countries remain protected by restrictions on the entry of foreign services and service providers, as well as discretionary and discriminatory regulatory requirements. International cooperation in services has attempted to follow the example of reciprocal market opening for goods, but this approach has delivered little incremental liberalization. More could be achieved through greater emphasis on international regulatory cooperation."

"The labor force of each industrial country is being shaped by three forces: ageing, education and migration. Drawing on a new database for the OECD countries and a standard analytical framework, this paper focuses on the relative and aggregate effects of these three forces on wages across different skill and age groups over 2000 to 2010. The variation in the age and educational structure of the labor force emerges as the dominant influence on wage changes. The impact is uniform and egalitarian: in almost all countries, the changes in the age and skill structure favor the low-skilled and hurt the highly skilled across age groups. Immigration plays a relatively minor role, except in a handful of open countries, like Australia and Canada, where it accentuates the wage-equalizing impact of ageing and education. Emigration is the only inegalitarian influence, especially in Ireland and a few Eastern European countries which have seen significant outflows of high-skilled labor to Western European Union countries."