Research Themes

People, Firms and Places

International trade affects prices, wages and employment opportunities. We unpack how trade integration, trade disintegration and trade policy affect individuals, businesses and the nations and regions of the UK in a differentiated manner.

Focussing on people, we will compare aggregate effects of, say, signing a free trade agreement with individual outcomes for certain groups of workers or consumers and in specific regions. A new ‘Jobs in Trade Dataset’ will provide detailed information about some 6.5 million UK jobs that are directly or indirectly linked to exporting activity.  As changes in wages and employment may also affect public views on trade openness, we will study how these impacts shape voting behaviour and radical sentiments.

Focussing on firms, international trade is increasingly part of the production process, and therefore major shocks such as Covid-19 and the rise of China profoundly affect UK businesses.  Our research will look at the responses of businesses to these trends in terms of productivity, the use of international supply chains and investment decisions.  Some projects will focus specifically on services trade, which comprises 50% of UK exports.

Focussing on places, regional policymaking in the devolved administrations creates challenges for a unified UK Internal Market. For instance, in some sectors, different rules could apply in each UK nation and yet we need to reconcile this with having a single UK market. We will focus on the regulatory and political fragmentation in the UK Internal Market and its implications for intra-UK trade, e.g. in agri-food products, and for the regional competition for foreign investment.

Digitisation and Technical Change

Recent advances in digital technologies are affecting the costs and therefore patterns of international trade and production. New digital technologies have, for example, allowed businesses to reach customers in other countries and coordinate their international supply chains more easily.

These opportunities are increasingly being spread to small firms. New digital technologies have also changed the value and volume of data that businesses collect, store and investigate, often on us as individuals, and created new huge platform companies.

Understanding how trade policy should adjust to this moving technological target requires evidence on the impact these technological changes have brought about and how current policy and regulations, for example, those on personal data or intellectual property, have shaped business decisions, in particular around international trade and production. The digital and technological change theme will investigate both of those issues, providing new evidence for the UK and other countries.

To understand the new directions for trade policy this new evidence implies, a final strand of the research will bring together a multidisciplinary team of experts from across CITP.  The research findings from this strand will make important contributions toward reconciling personal data protection, the coordination of governance regulations across countries and digital trade provisions in trade agreements.

Negotiating a Turbulent World

From Brexit, Covid-19, climate change, to geopolitical tensions and conflicts, the international trade system is facing an enormous number of challenges and shocks.

The UK must navigate these challenges globally but also domestically: trade arrangements between UK nations have been transformed post-Brexit, giving rise to political and constitutional stress.

This challenging environment for trade and trade policy creates a pressing need for policy-responsive research. The projects under this theme will integrate different disciplines – law, economics, political science, and business studies – to ask:

  • What are the impacts of new obstacles to trade cooperation?
  • What are the effects of uncertainty?
  • How can the UK use trade policy to address global challenges?
  • How can the UK navigate – and lessen – trade frictions?

We will apply these broader questions within four more specific areas: climate change, deep regulatory cooperation through Free Trade Agreements, navigating uncertainty and trade frictions post-Brexit, and trade governance between the nations of the UK.