ISET had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Irene Iodice, Assistant Professor of Economics at Bielefeld University and a CESifo Research Network Affiliate, as our guest speaker at ISET Research Seminar.
Irene’s research titled “Transparency as Trade Policy: The Value of Advanced Notifications in Technical Regulations,” tackles an overlooked friction in international trade: not regulations themselves, but uncertainty about them. When exporters don’t know in advance what compliance rules they’ll face in a destination market, many simply don’t enter – or exit temporarily while waiting for clarity.
Her paper puts precise numbers on this using WTO Technical Barriers to Trade (TBTs) notifications matched to French export data for 1995-2007. The key finding: advance notification cuts the export-participation loss from TBTs by more than half – from 7 to 3 percentage points. And when notification is delayed, exports bounce back immediately once the information arrives – firms were waiting for certainty, not adjustment time.
The policy implication is important: timely WTO notification can be worth up to 28 percentage points in tariff-equivalent terms. Regulatory transparency matters as much as actual tariff cuts.
