Essays on international trade and investment in services.

Summary Both trade and investment in services have grown considerably in recent decades due to technological advances in telecommunications and transportation. Increasingly, services have become an important issue in negotiations at the bilateral and multilateral levels. However, liberalizing services does not mean negotiating tariff cuts but requires market access. Using a gravity-based approach, the first chapter takes stock of the degree of openness for eleven sectors and sixty countries. The estimated degree of liberalization varies across countries and is not uniform for any given country. By signing an agreement specifically on trade in services, member countries significantly increase their trade. However, only those agreements that contain few sectoral exceptions and that negotiate advanced liberalization of trade in services have a significant impact. The content analysis of regional agreements shows that liberalization of temporary movement of people is largely hampered. By simulating several scenarios in a general equilibrium model, chapter 3 shows that countries gain from liberalizing their cross-border services trade, both direct investment and temporary entry for services suppliers. The determinants of investment in services are similar to those for goods, namely market potential and investment costs. Moreover, investment decisions are particularly interdependent. The regions differ in their types of investment: developed countries attract more horizontal direct investment, whereas investment is vertical in nature in developing countries. Through the different chapters, this thesis highlights the importance of considering services by taking into account its specificities and its different modes.