Three essays on non-tariff measures and the role of the World Trade Organization

While tariffs dropped in the last decades, it's not clear whether this is the case for protectionism. The concomitant rise of complex to measure global value chains and non-tariff barriers blur the analysis. In this context, it seems necessary to re-examine the WTO's ability to reduce protectionism. First, the WTO promotes specific legal trade frameworks in bilateral trade agreements. In my first essay, with a model including heterogeneous firms and quality standards, I find that the choice of legal trade framework mainly depends on the distribution of productivity among firms. Second, WTO introduced several monitoring systems such as the TBT STC committee to deal with disputes between partners. In my second and third essays, with new data and a new methodology, I discuss how the most stringent technical norms (TBT STCs) impact trade and global value chains both negatively and positively, depending on the sector and the measures used for TBT STCs.