Trade Policy for a New Era: The 2025 Heckscher-Ohlin Conference
16 October 2025, Stockholm, Sweden
Economic research in the 21st century has made important new contributions to our understanding of international trade. Yet, significant gaps remain between empirical research and trade policy. The 2025 Heckscher-Ohlin conference aims to bridge contemporary research and policymaking by bringing together leading trade economists and practitioners. The ultimate goal is to make trade policy more firmly evidence-based.
With 2025 marking a new era for international trade, this year’s conference will focus on the challenges arising from this shift. How can we restore rules-based trade when its original architect now seems to be turning away from it?
The conference is jointly organised by the National Board of Trade Sweden and the Stockholm School of Economics.
Researchers must make their work more digestible to policymakers
Interview with Pol Antràs
As a keynote speaker at the 2025 Heckscher-Ohlin Conference, Pol Antràs joins us to reflect on how trade research is – or is not – feeding into today’s policymaking. With a background at the forefront of international trade theory, Antràs offers unique insights into the state of research, the legacy of Heckscher and Ohlin, and the road ahead for more evidence-based policy.
Pol Antràs, it is a pleasure to welcome you as a keynote speaker at the 2025 Heckscher-Ohlin Conference. One of the goals is to connect trade policymaking more closely with contemporary trade research. Without revealing too much of your keynote, what would you say are the key policy insights emerging from today’s trade research?
I would highlight two broad areas. First, I think contemporary research has made a lot of progress in understanding how global value chains emerge and how they respond to changes in policy. This sometimes leads to more subtle or unexpected effects than in traditional conceptualisations of international trade. Second, a lot of recent work has shed light on how large and fast trade liberalisation episodes affect some vulnerable groups in society, so this should shed light on policymakers attempting to cushion the negative aspects of trade opening.
A central premise of the conference is that trade policy is increasingly disconnected from what we know about international trade and the effects of different types of trade reform. In your view, what can be done – beyond attending this conference – to close that gap?
Speaking for the research community, perhaps we should devote more efforts to making the lessons of our work more digestible to policymakers. Modern economics research is mathematically complex, and technical aspects often make research’s lessons unnecessarily obscure. There is a good reason why economics turned mathematical, and I am not suggesting turning back the clock, but we have plenty of tools at our hand to produce more digestible versions of our work that may help policymakers better understand certain trade-offs.
Swedish trade scholars Eli Heckscher and Bertil Ohlin are widely recognised for shaping 20th-century trade theory. To what extent do you think their ideas still matter in the current global economic context?
Absolutely, their ideas still matter a lot. Modern trade theories emphasise many aspects that were not necessarily salient in Heckscher and Ohlin’s theories, but their core ideas – and especially their formalisation by Paul Samuelson – continue to be of first-order for understanding the causes and consequences of globalisation. Modern trade theory has expanded and generalised the work of Heckscher and Ohlin, much like modern physics expanded and generalised Newtonian physics.
Finally, what are your expectations for the conference?
I look forward to fruitful interactions with other academics and, especially, with policymakers. I am sure I will learn a lot!
