Fachbereich für

Tax & Trade Policy

Unser Team

Legge

Dr. Stefan Legge

Head of Tax & Trade Policy / Vizedirektor

Hongler

Prof. Dr. Peter Hongler

Ordentlicher Professor für Steuerrecht / Direktor

Stocker

Prof. Dr. Raoul Stocker

Honorarprofessor / Direktor

Regli

Dr. Florian Regli

Senior Research Fellow / Vizedirektor

Vallender

Prof. em. Dr. Klaus Vallender

Freischaffender Mitarbeiter

Habich

Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter & Doktorand

Pillep

Felix Arthur Valentin Pillep

Studentischer Mitarbeiter

Rupp

Studentischer Mitarbeiter

Publikationen

St. Galler Kommentar zu Art. 26 – 28, 74, 85, Vorbem. 94 ff., 94, 104 BV

Peter Hettich, Klaus Vallender

Juristische Publikation

Mehr

Swiss Trade Monitor – 04 – Dealing with less Freedom

Stefan Legge, Ronny Oberholzer, Jason Rosenthal

The Swiss Trade Monitor documents time trends in Switzerland's foreign goods trade. The fourth edition focuses on Switzerland's trade relationship with other countries in light of the global decline in freedom as measured by Freedom House. Freedom scores indicate that for 17 consecutive years the number of countries with decreasing liberty has exceeded the ones with increasing liberty. Today, only 21% percent of the worldwide population lives in nations classified as free. These nations account for 50% percent of global GDP. Among Switzerland's top-20 trading partners - collectively accounting for 85% of the country's foreign goods trade - we observe that there is only a modest decline in average Freedom House scores. Only four top-20 partners (China, India, Singapore, and Turkey) are classified as partly free or not free. The trade-weighted average Freedom House score for all of Switzerland's trading partners is 79 out of a maximum of 100. While there is a notable decline of ten points from 2005 until 2020, it has recently stabilized. We document the variation across industries and find that for some key sectors like precious metals, watches, or specialized machines the average Freedom House score is relatively low.

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Swiss Trade Monitor – 03 – FTA Switzerland-Indonesia after 1 Year

Stefan Legge, Ronny Oberholzer, Jason Rosenthal

The Swiss Trade Monitor documents time trends in Switzerland's foreign goods trade. The third edition focuses on Switzerland's trade relationship with Indonesia. In November 2021, a free trade agreement (FTA) between the two nations came into effect. We provide a preliminary empirical account of the FTA. Preferential FTA tariff rates were only applied to about 11% of Swiss imports from Indonesia in 2022. This is, to a large extent, because FTAs are generally less used for the products which account for the lion's share of Swiss imports from Indonesia. There is, thus far, little evidence to suggest that the FTA has caused the bilateral trade volume to increase substantially. It is crucial to obtain detailed customs data from FTA partners in order to monitor and manage the success of trade agreements. The topic of palm oil imports from Indonesia played a key role in the campaigns for the Swiss referendum on the FTA. This contrasts with reality: barely any palm oil is imported from Indonesia and only a fraction of it has benefited from preferential FTA tariffs.

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Swiss Trade Monitor – 02 – Trade CH-UK after Brexit

Stefan Legge, Ronny Oberholzer, Jason Rosenthal

The Swiss Trade Monitor documents time trends in Switzerland's foreign goods trade. The second edition focuses on Switzerland's trade relationship with the United Kingdom. Analyzing Swiss data, we show that both the Brexit referendum of 2016 and the departure from the European Union in early 2020 had a clear negative impact on both Swiss imports from and exports to the United Kingdom.

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Swiss Trade Monitor – 01 – Foreign Goods Trade during COVID and War

The Swiss Trade Monitor documents time trends in Switzerland's foreign goods trade. The first edition considers data from January 2019 until November 2022, a time span that covers both the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 and the Russo-Ukrainian War which started in February 2022. Both events led to noticeable declines in trade volumes which were, however, of temporary nature. Swiss foreign trade recovered quickly from the pandemic-induced decrease. And in contrast to the European Union or the United States, Swiss exports to Russia do not show a lasting decline throughout 2022. Large volumes of pharmaceutical exports imply that Swiss-Russian trade in 2022 is at a level similar to the previous years.

Mehr

Innovation and trade in the presence of credit constraints

IN: Canadian Journal of Economics, 14.10.2021

Reto Föllmi, Stefan Legge, Alexa Tiemann

Wissenschaftlicher Artikel

This paper examines how trade liberalization affects investment in R&D at the firm level. We provide a model with entrepreneurs that differ in their wealth endowments, causing them to rely on external funds to different extents. In the presence of capital market imperfections, this implies heterogeneous access to external financing such that poor entrepreneurs run smaller firms, are less likely to invest in R&D and are more likely to exit the market. Decreasing trade costs resulting from tariff reductions exacerbate these characteristics. Using firm-level panel data on seven Latin American countries for 2006 and 2010, we find support for our theoretical predictions. While prior research emphasizes a positive impact of trade liberalization on firms’ productivity-enhancing activities, we provide novel evidence showing that financial constraints can impair the effect on R&D efforts. These results suggest that imperfect capital markets can prevent welfare gains from trade liberalization to materialize.

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Human Barriers to International Trade

Irene Fensore, Stefan Legge, Lukas Schmid

This paper investigates whether the relatedness of populations across the world shapes international trade flows. Using data on common ancestry for 172 countries covering more than 99% of global trade, we document that country pairs with a larger ancestral distance are less likely to trade with each other (extensive margin) and, if they do trade, they trade fewer goods and smaller volumes (intensive margin). The results are robust to including a vast array of control variables capturing other sources of heterogeneity, including micro-geographic, political, linguistic, and religious differences. We discuss the role of several determinants of trade that lead to this negative relationship, namely differences in trust, values, consumption structures, political institutions, technology, as well as recent migration networks. Exploring the robustness of our findings, we use detailed census information on ancestry and show that U.S. states trade significantly more with ancestrally close countries.

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Weitere Publikationen

Aktivitäten

Swiss Trade Monitor

Der dritte Quartalsbericht 2024, erstellt von Stefan Legge, Ronny Oberholzer und Jason Rosenthal, zeigt, dass der Dienstleistungshandel weiterhin wächst. Allerdings stagniert der Aussenhandel bei Gütern....

Swiss Trade Monitor

In der 14. Ausgabe zeigen Stefan Legge, Florian Helbig, Ronny Oberholzer und Jason Rosenthal, wie der Schweizer Aussenhandel durch Wirtschaftswachstum in anderen Ländern beeinflusst wird....

Swiss Trade Monitor

Der zweite Quartalsbericht 2024, erstellt von Stefan Legge, Ronny Oberholzer und Jason Rosenthal, zeigt Wachstum sowohl im Schweizer Güter- als auch im Dienstleistungshandel.

Swiss Trade Monitor

In der 13. Ausgabe untersuchen Stefan Legge, Ronny Oberholzer und Jason Rosenthal den Schweizer Aussenhandel mit Alkohol-, Tabak- und Nikotinprodukten.

Swiss Trade Monitor

Stefan Legge, Ronny Oberholzer und Jason Rosenthal analysieren in der zwölften Ausgabe den Schweizer Güterhandel mit Nationen in Afrika.

Swiss Trade Monitor

Der erste Quartalsbericht 2024 findet abermals eine divergierende Entwicklungen im Schweizer Aussenhandel. Während der Güterhandel weitgehend stagniert und im ersten Quartal 2024 signifikant unter dem Vorjahr blieb, beobachten wir im Dienstleistungshandel weiterhin ein starkes Wachstum....

Swiss Trade Monitor

In der elften Ausgabe des Swiss Trade Monitors veranschaulichen Stefan Legge, Ronny Oberholzer und Jason Rosenthal, welche grosse und erfolgreiche Rolle die Schweiz im internationalen Handel mit Kaffee spielt.

ILE in den Medien

Die gründliche Analyse von Handelsdaten kann zahlreiche Erkenntnisse bringen. Das Team vom ILE-HSG hat sich die Entwicklung der Schweizer Handelsströme mit russlandnahen Ländern angeschaut und dabei Indizien für mögliche Umgehungsgeschäfte ausgemacht. Darüber hat am 26. Februar auch die SRF Tagesschau berichtet.

Projekte

Swiss Trade Monitor

Der Swiss Trade Monitor dokumentiert relevante Trends im Schweizer Aussenhandel. Jede Ausgabe liefert Grafiken zur aktuellen Entwicklung und beleuchtet zudem ein für die Schweiz wichtiges Thema im Detail.

Ansprechperson

Stefan Legge

Lehre

Die aktuellen Lehrveranstaltungen der Vertreter des Instituts für Law and Economics, Fachbereich Tax & Trade Policy, finden Sie in dem Kursangebot des jeweiligen Semesters.

Weitere Aktivitäten

Forum für Steuerrecht

Seminare

Lehrgänge

Board Education

In der Schriftenreihe «Finanzwissenschaft und Finanzrecht» sind mittlerweile über hundert Werke erschienen.

Liste aller Werke

Unsere Adresse

Institut für Law and Economics (ILE-HSG)

Universität St.Gallen (HSG)
Varnbüelstrasse 19
9000 St.Gallen

Ihre Kontaktperson

Ladislava Metzger
Administrative Institutsleitung

Telefon: +41 71 224 25 20

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