al. 2020). The associated disruption to crisis health planning in trading partners makes net importers of medical products particularly vulnerable (Baldwin and Evenett, 2020).

The basic premise underlying the analysis that follows is that attributes of public procurement regulation may influence incentives to use trade policy and decisions to requisition existing stocks and prohibit exports in crises. The idea is that specific attributes of procurement regimes may facilitate or constrain the ability of agencies to rapidly procure needed supplies of medical products in an emergency. PP practices that are designed to control corruption, ensure accountability through due process, transparency, nondiscrimination, and competitive bidding may constrain the ability to respond rapidly. Conversely, PP regimes that are efficient in the sense of allocating contracts more rapidly may be more conducive to addressing an emergency and attenuate incentives to resort to trade restrictions. We do not have strong priors on whether the relationship will be positive or negative but treat this as an empirical question.

Several dimensions of PP policy may be salient in influencing the likelihood that trade policy is used. For example, “buy national” prescriptions reflecting industrial development objectives may be accompanied by restrictive import policies to support domestic production. In circumstances where domestic production capacity is too small to satisfy a crisis-induced increase in demand, a policy bias towards domestic sourcing may be associated with a temporary reduction of removal of import restrictions. The higher the initial import barriers the greater the scope for liberalization. In short, differences in the attributes of PP regimes may be associated with differences in trade policy responses to a global pandemic.

In our analysis of PP regimes we are limited by the availability of indicators that characterize salient attributes of PP regimes.<sup>8</sup> One relevant feature of procurement systems on which comparable information is reported on a cross-country basis is the time taken to complete procurement processes. The World Bank Doing Business Contracting with the Government indicator measures the time <mark>of awarding a specific public contract to a domestically-owned medium-sized limited liability company based on the indicator’s assumptions.</mark> Countries where PP takes more time may be at a disadvantage in procuring supplies even if standard processes are not applied in a crisis. For example, insofar as a nation’s PP “type” is common knowledge and suppliers prefer to sell products in short supply to buyers that can credibly offer rapid contracting and processing of payments. Another attribute of prevailing PP regimes is membership of the WTO GPA and PTAs that encompass government procurement. We expect that members of such PP-liberalizing trade agreements will make less use of trade restrictions in a crisis than other countries. To the best of our knowledge these are issues that have not been investigated in the extant literature on procurement and trade, which has focused on home bias in the allocation of public contracts and associated impacts on costs and productivity.<sup>9</sup>

# **3. Trade policy measures during COVID-19**

The source of trade policy data used in the analysis is a European University Institute (EUI), Global Trade Alert (GTA) and World Bank project that tracks changes in trade policies for medical products starting on January 1, 2020. The exercise classifies measures as restrictive or liberalizing and differentiates between type of instrument (tariff, quota, licensing requirement,

> 8 For example, cross-country data on the extent to which jurisdictions include “buy national” provisions or PP processes include preferences for specific types of domestic bidders, such as SMEs, are not available. See e.g., Hoekman and Tas (2020).

> 9 See e.g., Shingal (2015), Kutlina-Dimitrova and Lakatos (2016), Hoekman and Sanfilippo (2020).

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