The Fiscal Impacts of Trade and Investment Treaties

Abstract This article examines the extent to which the latest wave of trade and investment treaties has impacted the fiscal stability of the world’s nations. We construct two new measures of trade liberalization based on the importance of a country in the global network of trade and investment treaties, namely the number of trade treaty links and the hub connectedness of a country. This analysis is important since many analyses of the welfare impacts of trade liberalization typically do not consider the impact on the fiscal balances of governments or assume that any loss of tariff revenue would be made up by the imposition of indirect taxes, like a Value Added Tax. Using a cross-country regression analysis, we confirm that trade liberalization has, on average, reduced the amount of tariff revenue collected. Furthermore, trade liberalization is not correlated with an automatic compensation for lost tariff revenue through other taxation measures. We find, in some cases, that trade and investment treaties are correlated with a reduction in total fiscal revenues and an increase in government debt. These results suggest that policymakers need to take the fiscal impacts of trade and investment liberalization into account when making decisions about trade and investment policy.