Trade and Development
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The Trade and Development Series seeks to provide objective, accessible information about the new trade agenda. Titles in the series cover a wide range of topics, from regional trade agreements and customs reform to agriculture, intellectual property rights, services, and other key issues currently being discussed in World Trade Organization negotiations. Contributors to the series represent some of the world’s leading thinkers and specialists on international trade issues. Titles in this series undergo internal and external review under the management of the Trade Group's Advisory Board in the World Bank's Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network.
Items in this collection
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Publication
Trade Preference Erosion : Measurement and Policy Response
(Washington, DC: World Bank and Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)The multilateral trade system rests on the principle of nondiscrimination. The most-favored-nation (MFN) clause embodied in article one of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was the defining principle for a system that emerged in the post, Second World War era, largely in reaction to the folly of protectionism and managed trade that contributed to the global economic depression of the 1930s. From its origins, however, the GATT has allowed for exemptions from the MFN rule in the case of reciprocal preferential trade agreements. It also permits granting unilateral (nonreciprocal) preferences to developing countries. To provide some background for the debate on the potential extent and implications of preference erosion, the chapters in this volume review the value of preferences for beneficiary countries, assess the implications of preference erosion under different global liberalization scenarios, and discuss potential policy responses. One set of chapters focuses on the nonreciprocal preference schemes of individual industrial countries, particularly, Australia, Canada, Japan, the United States, and the member states of the European Union (EU). A second set of chapters considers sectoral features of these preference schemes, such as those applying to agricultural and nonagricultural products, and the important arrangements for textiles and clothing. A final set of chapters considers the overall effects of preferences and the options for dealing with preference erosion resulting from nondiscriminatory trade liberalization. -
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Distortions to Agricultural Incentives : A Global Perspective, 1955-2007
(Washington, DC: World Bank and Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)This book provides an overview of the evolution of distortions to agricultural incentives caused by price, trade, and exchange rate policies in a large sample of countries spanning the world. This chapter begins with a brief summary of the long history of national distortions to agricultural markets. It then outlines the methodology used to generate annual indicators of the extent of government interventions in markets, details of which are provided in Anderson et al. (2008a, 2008b) and appendix A of this volume. A description of the economies being examined and their economic growth and structural changes over recent decades is then briefly presented as a preface to the main section of the chapter, in which the nominal rate of assistance (NRA) and consumer tax equivalent (CTE) estimates are summarized across regions and over the decades since the 1950s. These estimates are discussed in far more detail in the regional studies that follow, chapters two-ten. A summary of an additional set of indicators of agricultural price distortions, presented in chapter eleven, is based on the trade restrictiveness index first developed by Anderson and Neary (2005). In chapter twelve, the focus shifts from countries to commodities, and various distortion indicators are used to provide a sense of how distorted each of the key farm commodity markets is globally. Chapter thirteen uses the study's NRA and CTE estimates to provide a new set of results from a global economy-wide model. It quantifies the impacts of reforms undertaken since the early 1980s, and of the policies still in place as of 2004, on global markets, net farm incomes, and welfare. Finally, that chapter concludes by drawing on the lessons learned to speculate on the prospects for further reducing the disarray in world agricultural markets. -
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Distortions to Agricultural Incentives in Africa
(World Bank, 2009)One of every two people in Sub-Saharan Africa survives on less than $1.25 a day. That proportion has changed little over the past three decades, unlike in Asia and elsewhere, so the region's share of global poverty has risen from one-tenth to almost one-third since 1980. About 70 percent of today's 400 million poor Africans live in rural areas and depend directly or indirectly on farming for their livelihoods. While that rural share was even higher in the past, it means policies affecting the incentives for farmers to produce and sell farm products remain a major influence on the extent of Africa's poverty. The case studies help address questions such as the following: where is there still a policy bias against agricultural production? To what extent are some farmers now being protected from import competition? What are the political economic forces behind the more-successful reformers, and how do they compare with those in less-successful countries where major distortions in agricultural incentives remain? How important have domestic political forces been in bringing about reform, as compared with international forces? What explains the cross commodity pattern of distortions within the agricultural sector of each country? What policy lessons and trade implications can be drawn from these differing experiences with a view to ensuring better growth-enhancing and poverty-reducing outcomes in the study's focus countries and in the region's other economies? -
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Distortions to Agricultural Incentives in Asia
(World Bank, 2009)This study is part of a global research project seeking to understand the changing scope and impact of the policy bias against agriculture and the reasons behind agricultural policy reforms in Africa, Europe's transition economies, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia. One purpose of the project is to obtain quantitative indicators of the effects of recent policy interventions. A second objective is to gain a deeper understanding of the political economy of trends in the distortions in agricultural incentives in various national settings. The third goal is to use this deeper understanding to explore the prospects for reducing the distortions in agricultural incentives and discover the likely implications for agricultural competitiveness, equality, and poverty reduction in many countries, large and small. This book provides an overview of the evolution of the distortions to agricultural incentives caused by price and trade policies in the World Bank-defined regions of East Asia and South Asia. The volume includes an introduction and summary chapter and commissioned studies of three Northeast Asian, five Southeast Asian, and four South Asian economies. The chapters are followed by two appendixes. The first appendix describes the methodology the authors have used to measure the nominal and relative rates of assistance for farmers and the taxes and subsidies on food consumption. The second appendix provides summaries of the author's annual estimates of these rates of assistance across the focus economies. Together, the 12 economies the authors study account for no less than 95 percent of the region's agricultural value added, farm households, total population, and total gross domestic product. -
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Distortions to Agricultural Incentives in Europe's Transition Economies
(Washington, DC : World Bank, 2008)The main purpose of this study is to assess the changing landscape of agricultural protection and taxation patterns in the region. The study is based on the EU-10 sample, plus Turkey, as well as seven countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS): Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, the Russian Federation, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan (the CIS-7). In 2000-04, these countries accounted for 89 percent of the region's agricultural value added, 91 percent of the population, and 95 percent of total gross domestic product (GDP). In agricultural subsidy and trade policy, analyses of politically feasible reforms or policy options for coping with structural changes (such as the current boom in energy raw material prices that has intersectoral Dutch disease effects) need to be based on a clear understanding of the recent and current extent of policy interventions and the political and economic forces behind the evolution of these interventions. The second purpose of this study is thus to improve our understanding of the political economy of distortions in agricultural incentives in countries in the region. Based on this better understanding, the study's third purpose is to explore the prospects for additional reductions in the distortions in agricultural incentives and their implications for the agricultural competitiveness and trade of countries in the region. -
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Distortions to Agricultural Incentives in Latin America
(Washington, DC : World Bank, 2008)This book provides an overview of the evolution of distortions to agricultural incentives caused by price and trade policies in the World Bank-defined region of Latin America and the Caribbean. Following the introduction and summary, it includes commissioned country studies of one Caribbean, one Central American, and six South American economies. The chapters are followed by two appendixes. The first describes the methodology used to measure the nominal and relative rates of assistance to farmers and the taxes and subsidies involved in food consumption; the second provides country and regional summaries, in tables, of annual estimates of these rates of assistance. This study on Latin America is based on a sample of eight countries, comprising the big four economies of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico; Colombia and Ecuador, two of the poorest South American tropical countries; the Dominican Republic, the largest Caribbean economy; and Nicaragua, the poorest country in Central America. Together, in 2000-04, these countries accounted for 78 percent of the region's population, 80 percent of the region's agricultural value added, and 84 percent of the total gross domestic product (GDP) of Latin America. -
Publication
Services Trade and Development : The Experience of Zambia
(Washington, DC: World Bank and Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)Some see trade in services as irrelevant to the development agenda for least developed countries (LDCs). Others see few benefits from past market openings by LDCs. This book debunks both views. It finds that serious imperfections in Zambia's reform of services trade deprived the country of significant benefits and diminished faith in liberalization. -
Publication
International Migration, Economic Development and Policy
(Washington, DC: World Bank and Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)This volume reflects the expansion of the World Bank Research Program on International Migration and Development into new substantive and geographic areas. It presents a new global migration database and includes studies of the determinants and impact of return and circular migration, the impact of the flow of ideas on fertility, host country policies and their impact on immigrants, and the impact of international migration and remittances on poverty and other development indicators. The studies cover countries from Latin America, North Africa, South Asia, the South Pacific, and Western Europe, and show that the impact of migration on education and health tends to benefit girls more than boys, that its impact on labor force participation tends to be stronger for women than men, that return migrants tend to do better than non-migrants, and that fertility has tended to decline in countries whose migration has been to the West and has failed to do so in countries whose migration has been to the Gulf. The purpose of the case studies is to illustrate and clarify many theoretical mechanisms and to advance understanding of the impact of different migration policies, given that introducing policy variables in econometric regressions is generally difficult. Each study in this volume aims to answer a variety of development- and policy-related questions using the most appropriate of these three methodologies. These empirical studies and analyses include exploration of some novel hypotheses; they are also new in terms of the topics selected and the regions/ countries examined -
Publication
The International Migration of Women
(Washington, DC: World Bank and Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)Women now account for nearly half of all international migration. Theoretical and empirical models that omit gendered determinants and impacts of migration are missing key elements of the story. Women's roles in destination labor markets and in remittance flows-to cite just two examples-are crucial to understanding the development impacts of international migration. This volume surveys the state of our knowledge and provides new research on the gendered determinants and impacts of migration and remittances as well as on the patterns of labor market participation of women migrants. It also sketches a road map for future research on gender and international migration. This research on women and international migration illustrates the type of analytical work that can shape policies to economically empower women migrants as well as women left behind by male migration. It is authors' hope that such analysis will lead to policies that boost productivity, raise incomes, and improve welfare in both sending and receiving countries. This volume addresses several issues. The introductory chapter provides an overview of the volume; it includes a description of methodology, data, main results, and conclusions from the six remaining chapters. The second chapter reviews the existing research on gender and international migration and can be considered a starting point for the remaining chapters. The third chapter focuses on the gendered determinants of migration and remittances in rural Mexico, an important sending country. The following two chapters (chapters 4 and 5) address the impact of migration and remittances on sending countries and provide analysis of household- level data from Ghana and Mexico. Chapter 6 turns to the labor market participation and performance of female migrants in a major destination country, the United States. The volume concludes with a forward-looking chapter that summarizes the major findings, links those to migration policy, and outlines some of the important research and policy issues that need to be addressed in the future. -
Publication
Poverty and the WTO : Impacts of the Doha Development Agenda
(Washington, DC: World Bank and Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)This study reports on the findings from a major international research project investigating the poverty impacts of a potential Doha Development Agenda (DDA). It combines in a novel way the results from several strands of research. First, it draws on an intensive analysis of the DDA Framework Agreement, with particularly close attention paid to potential reforms in agriculture. The scenarios are built up using newly available tariff line data, and their implications for world markets are established using a global modeling framework. These world trade impacts form the basis for 12 country case studies of the national poverty impacts of these DDA scenarios. The focus countries are Bangladesh, Brazil (2 studies), Cameroon, China (2 studies), Indonesia, Mexico, Mozambique, the Philippines, the Russian Federation, and Zambia. Although the diversity of approaches taken in these studies limits the ability to draw broader conclusions, an additional study that provides a 15-country cross-section analysis is aimed at this objective. Finally, a global analysis provides estimates for the world as a whole.