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The doctoral work will consist of essays in international trade and related domains. It will mainly focus on the analysis of global value chains from a firm-level perspective. First, the research agenda will entail the development of new theoretical frameworks. Then, the predictions arising from these models will be tested in the data using sound empirical strategies. status: published

This paper estimates the impact of market access liberalization in high-income countries on sub-Saharan African exports. The methodology exploits the large reduction in trade barriers that was induced by three unilateral trade liberalization initiatives: (1) the dismantling of the Multi-Fiber Arrangement, (2) the African Growth and Opportunity Act in the United States, and (3) the extension of EU trade preferences for developed countries through its Everything-but-Arms program and the General System of Preferences. Using detailed product-level information at the 6-digit level of the Harmonized System and a triple-difference empirical specification, the usual endogeneity-of-policy critique is flexibly controlled for. The results indicate strongly positive export effects, which are especially large for textile, apparel, and leather products, and tend to be realized fully within 5 years. Each percentage point reduction in import tariffs raises exports to the EU by 0.73 percent and to the United States by 0.30 percent; effects are two to three times as large for textiles. The presence of strong Chinese imports has ambiguous effects on countries' ability to take advantage of trade liberalization as the impact on the export effects to the EU and the United States show an opposite sign.

This report is the first to estimate employment effects of looming American protectionism under US president Trump. We study the economic impact of a tightening of US trade policy on Belgium and on every EU member state, which we refer to as “America First” or “Trumpit” (like “Brexit”). Our estimates of EU job losses are based on the interconnectedness of an EU country with the US economy. We do this by taking into account the inter‐sectoral linkages between sectors within a country and between EU countries using sectoral input‐output data (World Input Output Database, WIOD). Thus, we consider EU jobs involved in direct EU exports to the US, as well as EU jobs corresponding to indirect exports from Europe to the US. Our study covers both exports of goods and services and accounts for services used as an input in goods. Our estimates are based on domestic value added rather than gross export values, since EU jobs are a function of domestic value added only. For Belgium, job losses of Trumpit range between 1200 and 5000 job losses, depending on the US tariff increase. Similarly, for the EU, job losses range between 50,000 and 240,000 jobs that will be lost depending on the US tariff scenario. For the EU, we find that the export value that will be lost ranges between 5% to 24 %, depending on the extent of the US import tariff increase. This corresponds to European GDP losses that range between 0.1 % to 0.4% of total EU GDP. ispartof: Vives Discussion Paper pages:1-43 status: published