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The project addresses the trade-environment nexus from 3 different angles: the impact of environmental commitments in modern preferential trade agreements on overall trade, on the composition of trade flows as well as on welfare; their impact on CO2 emission levels embodied in traded goods, and the trade-related consequences from internalising environmental costs of international transport. It adds to a still scant empirical literature on these issues and presents new empirical findings based on new methodological approaches. The analysis accounts for the heterogeneity of environmental commitments in preferential trade agreements by introducing a new categorisation of environmental provisions that explicitly focuses on the legal enforceability of such measures. Our work on transport externalities, for the first time, links work on the quantification of external costs of transport to international trade and allows to quantify the real income effects from internalising the costs of CO2 emissions in international trade activities. The methodology combines structural gravity estimation of trade elasticities with a general equilibrium trade model.

The changing nature of global supply chains (GSCs) requires a rethinking in the design of appropriate policy responses and in taking into account their employment and social impacts. The overall goal of RETHINK-GSC is to enhance our understanding of the impact of GSCs using new measures that can quantify the role knowledge flows, and more generally services inputs, and thus acknowledge the increasing importance of intangibles in global production. The project provides new and innovative methodologies for assessing the development of global supply chains, which generates new knowledge on ongoing and expected changes in GSCs due to shocks. The research, both theoretical and empirical, will be conducted mainly at the level of the firm – the unit that ultimately decides on the organisation of international production. Using the RETHINK-GSC innovative measures allows the projects' researchers and future scholars (i) to investigate the interaction between tangible and intangible GSCs to evaluate the changing nature of global supply chains, (ii) to provide novel ways of analysing the impact of GSCs on social, economic and environmental outcomes in European countries and (iii) to evaluate the resilience of GSCs to exogenous shocks.

The framework contract offers foreign policy expertise to the European Parliament in the area of international trade. WIFO is part of a European consortium composed of private consultancies and academic experts from 5 research institutes lead by Copenhagen Economics to conduct economic, trade, FDI and foreign policy analyses in the following fields: WTO as a pillar of the world trading system; multilateralism, regionalism and nationalism in the global economic governance; bilateral and plurilateral agreements; the EU's autonomous trade measures; the Generalised System of Preferences (GSP); rules of origin; trade defence instruments (anti-dumping, countervailing duties, safeguards); external aspects of the EU competitiveness strategy; the EU's trade related assistance to third countries; the external dimensions of the EU Single Market; the role of non-tariff barriers in EU trade policy and trade promotion; EU relations with third countries; foreign investment-related issue; public procurement; raw materials and energy related issues; other trade related issues, including label laws, environmental protection, sustainable development and labour rights.