Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/212865 
Year of Publication: 
2017
Series/Report no.: 
BOFIT Discussion Papers No. 2/2017
Publisher: 
Bank of Finland, Institute for Economies in Transition (BOFIT), Helsinki
Abstract: 
The accession negotiations of Belarus to the WTO are unusual since, due to its obligations in the Eurasian Economic Union, WTO accession is not expected to impact its tariffs or formerly substantial trade distorting agricultural subsidies. Nonetheless, we estimate that WTO accession will increase welfare by 8.8 percent per year in Belarus in the medium term. We show that inclusion of (i) foreign direct investment; (ii) reduction on non-discriminatory barriers against services providers; and (iii) our model with imperfect competition and endogenous productivity effects together produce esti-mated gains eleven times larger than a model of perfect competition with only cross-border trade in services. Our analysis is enabled by our production of a dataset on both discriminatory and non-discriminatory barriers in services and their ad valorem equivalents. Based on a new dataset on labor productivity by sector and type of ownership, in our central model we estimate that privatization will increase welfare by 35.4 percent. We find substantial variance in the estimated gains from privatiza-tion depending on model assumptions; but all the estimates of the impacts of privatization indicate substantial welfare gains.
JEL: 
D02
D58
F13
F14
L16
C68
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
ISBN: 
978-952-323-153-5
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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