Quantifying the Impact of FTAs on Canada's Financial Services Sector

Abstract

The infrastructure for services trade analysis has improved considerably with the development of databases on services trade for modelling purposes by the World Bank in its Trade in Services Database; on Mode 3 commercial presence trade in the form of foreign affiliate sales (FAS) data sets; on the prevalence of services trade barriers in the OECD’s and World bank’s Services Trade Restrictiveness Index (STRI) databases; new work at the OECD measuring uncertainty of market access in the form of a GATS Trade Restrictiveness Index, (GTRI) which measures bound commitments and can be used to derive “water” in the bindings, a measure of the extent to which existing market access restrictions could be increased without violating WTO commitments; and relatively comprehensive measures of the ad valorem equivalents (AVEs) of services trade barriers. We exploit these resources to develop estimates of the impact of liberalization of both cross-border and commercial presence trade in financial services on Canada’s financial services sector, taking into account both the extent of liberalization that is likely under a model, high-quality financial services chapter of an FTA and the effect of the FTA on binding existing market access commitments.

Keywords: Trade in services, financial services, banking, insurance, trade liberalization, STRI, bindings, FTAs, CGE

JEL Classification: F13, F14, G28