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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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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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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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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.

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The European monetary system has changed fundamentally in the past few years, as the central bank moved into new territory in buying debt and issuing bonds.

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This open access book gathers the results of an interdisciplinary research project led by the Swiss Competence Centers for Energy Research (SCCER CREST) and jointly implemented by several universities. It identifies political, economic and legal challenges and opportunities in the energy transition from a governance perspective by exploring a variety of tools that allow state, non-state and transnational actors to manage the transition of the energy industry toward less fossil-fuel reliance. When analyzing the roles of these actors, the authors examine not only formal procedures such as political and democratic processes, but also market behavior and societal practices. In other words, the handbook focuses on both the behavior and the positive and normative frameworks of political actors, bureaucracies, courts, international organizations, lobby groups, civil society, economic actors and individuals. The authors subsequently use their findings to formulate specific guidelines for lawmakers and other rule-makers, as well as private and public actors. To do so, they draw on approaches stemming from the legal, political and management sciences.

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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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