International Trade committee  In an economy like Canada, which is pretty diversified between manufacturing industries and the other respondents who are expressing their concerns, it is possible that there could be some winners and losers. Looking at it from the perspective of the aggregate macroeconomic variables, whatever the industries are producing, they have to sell somewhere, and they sell either to the export markets or to domestic markets.

International Trade committee  We don't use full employment in our models. We let the labour adjustments take place, and we measure the number of employed people in the entire economy. That's the reason for the difference between the projected baseline and the TPP scenario. Other models use different definitions of full employment.

International Trade committee  We have various sectors in our model, but only one single pool in the labour market. That is because, dealing with a global model, which is different than dealing with a country model, the amount of data and calculation time that would be required to split the total employment into winners and losers, as you suggest, would be irreconcilable.

International Trade committee  Thank you very much for your question. As we tried to explain initially, this is a trade, finance, macroeconomic, employment, and distribution model. It's a very comprehensive model of the world economy in which various feedback loops are taken into account. When, for example, there are increases in productive efficiency due to increases of fixed capital resulting from freer trade and financial movement, we are somehow displacing jobs in industries when they shift into more capital-intensive activities or when the same industry supplements or replaces jobs with robotics.

International Trade committee  To complement that answer, the institutions within the United Nations umbrella signed a number of collaborative research endeavours with a variety of universities around the world, precisely to deepen our analysis and our ability to understand the world economic effects of trade, investment, finance, etc.

International Trade committee  There are none at this moment that I'm aware of, but I don't have in front of me the complete file of written memoranda of understanding with universities around the world. In my area, in economics, I don't think there is currently a memorandum of understanding with a Canadian university, but we would be very happy to consider one, surely.

International Trade committee  Honourable members of the committee, we want to thank you for offering us the opportunity to discuss the findings of our study. This is an empirical analysis using the United Nations global policy model—“GPM” henceforth—conducted as part of a memorandum of understanding between UNCTAD and GDAE-Tufts University.