WEBINAR RECORDING · 2023-07
Services in the EU-India FTA
In this conversation: Hildegunn Nordås; discussant Amrita Saha; moderators Ben Shepherd and Hanna Norberg.
Hildegunn Nordås shows how draft treaty provisions can be translated into services-policy counterfactuals. The discussion with Amrita Saha moves beyond export gains to measurement limits, domestic regulation, and the development evidence needed to make an agreement politically persuasive.
Session information draws on the recording and its original description. Affiliations and policy context refer to the time of the webinar.
FROM THE CONVERSATION
Three takeaways.
What they mean in practice.
Prepared from the session recording using automatic transcription and editorial review. Follow the timestamp links for the original wording and context.
Model the commitments, not merely the agreement label
Watch 08:02 ↗Nordås maps the draft EU–India text, provision by provision, into changes in OECD services restrictiveness indicators. This exposes the actual reforms assumed and permits comparison with a generic FTA dummy. The clean draft excludes eventual reservations, so it is a benchmark for negotiation rather than a prediction of the final agreement.
Policy interpretation: Negotiators can use this approach to identify which concessions generate modeled gains and how reservations would change them. Publish the legal-to-indicator mapping so practitioners can scrutinize it.
Bilateral growth and economy-wide gains answer different questions
Watch 20:20 ↗The granular scenario produces much larger proportional changes in bilateral exports than in EU total exports; India’s total exports respond more strongly. Nordås relates this asymmetry to initial trade shares and preference margins. Telecommunications restrictions also matter beyond telecom exports because the sector supplies infrastructure for other services.
Policy interpretation: Compare bilateral, total, and sectoral results before describing who benefits. Prioritize enabling services while checking how initial market size shapes headline percentages.
Development outcomes belong in the negotiating case
Watch 52:27 ↗Saha argues that export gains alone may not persuade Indian policymakers facing poverty, inequality, and employment challenges. She proposes linking trade transactions to household data. In the final exchange she also distinguishes those development considerations from geopolitics and the desire to preserve policy space.
Policy interpretation: Complement aggregate simulations with distributional analysis, and avoid assuming that a favorable modeled trade outcome resolves political resistance to deeper commitments.
From the discussion
At 37:25, Shepherd presses Nordås on missing commercial-presence trade and alternative databases. At 40:08–40:53, she explains that BaTIS provenance flags permit excluding gravity-imputed observations and reports similar results in that check. Her defense of complementarities across supply modes does not remove the coverage mismatch. At 44:47–46:04, she clarifies that EU totals aggregate country-level calculations, retaining different regulatory preference margins across member states.
Recording references
- Recording: translating treaty provisions into policy changes — 08:02–09:22; 14:06–15:31
- Recording: measurement and aggregation discussion — 37:25–46:04
- Recording: development and political economy — 52:27–57:28
