Trade and Development
44 items available
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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
International Trade in Services : New Trends and Opportunities for Developing Countries
(World Bank, 2010)International trade in services also provides an assessment of how policy makers can further bolster their service industries by leveraging the changes prompted by technological advancements. The book provides policy recommendations that include the reduction of barriers to services trade across all sectors and the promotion of health- and environment-related development policies that should be promoted in parallel with a burgeoning services market. The first recommendation is considered the most important, because it focuses on the need to ensure trade openness, which helps ensure the access to services and promotes the quality of services provision through foreign and domestic competition. Moreover, the issue of temporary movement of labor is another focus of this book, given that it is one of the most important means of service exports for developing countries. This is an issue that is considered technically complex and politically sensitive because of its political and security implications. The book examines mechanisms that have been used by various countries to liberalize the temporary movement of persons and concludes that regardless of the negotiating forum- multilateral, regional, or bilateral-the policy making results on temporary movement of labor are, so far, modest and limited to a small range of categories. However, it proposes alternative ways to move forward that require further analysis by countries and relevant international organizations, including the World Bank. -
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 Trade in Health Services and the GATS : Current Issues and Debates
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2006)Health ministries around the world face a new challenge: to assess the risks and respond to the opportunities of the increasing openness in health services under the World Trade Organization's (WTO) General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). This publication addresses this challenge head-on by providing analytical tools to policymakers in health and trade ministries alike who are involved in the liberalization agenda and, specifically, in the GATS negotiations. This book informs and assists policymakers in formulating trade policy and negotiating internationally. There is ongoing and animated international debate about the impact of GATS on public services in general and health in particular. In response, the book offers different perspectives from more than 15 leading experts. Some of the authors stress opportunities linked to trade in health services, others focus more on the risks. The book offers: Detailed legal analysis of the impact of the agreement on health policy; an overview of trade commitments in health-related services; new empirical evidence from nine country studies; and a simple 10-step explanation on how to deal with GATS negotiations. -
Publication
Global Integration and Technology Transfer
(Washington, DC: World Bank and Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)This volume presents a rich set of analyses exploring how trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) can help increase economic growth by allowing firms to tap into and benefit from the global pool of knowledge. The chapters demonstrate that both obtaining access to foreign markets and opening their own economies to trade and FDI are crucial to promoting economic growth in developing countries, because they stimulate international technology diffusion. The volume also identifies government policies that can facilitate technology transfer and its absorption in the developing world. -
Publication
Safeguards and Antidumping in Latin American Trade Liberalization : Fighting Fire with Fire
(Washington, DC: World Bank and Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)This book is a report on success-success in trade liberalization and in the removal of trade barriers so as to integrate Latin American economies into the international economy. More particularly, this book is about how several Latin American governments created and managed safeguards and antidumping mechanisms as part of this liberalization. The core of this book is a set of studies describing how seven Latin American countries-Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Peru-have used these trade instruments. Each country study was conducted by analysts from that country. Many of the analysts were high government officials during their country's liberalization, so they have hands-on experience with the construction and the management of these instruments. -
Publication
Global Agricultural Trade and Developing Countries
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2005)This book explores the outstanding issues in global agricultural trade policy and evolving world production and trade patterns. Its coverage of agricultural trade issues ranges from the details of cross-cutting policy issues to the highly distorted agricultural trade regimes of industrial countries and detailed studies of agricultural commodities of economic importance to many developing countries. The book brings together the background issues and findings to guide researchers and policymakers in their global negotiations and domestic policies on agriculture. The book also explores the key questions for global agricultural policies, both the impacts of current trade regimes and the implications of reform. It complements the recent agricultural trade handbook that focuses primarily on the agricultural issues within the context of the World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations (Ingco and Nash 2004). -
Publication
Customs Modernization Handbook
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2005)This handbook aims to make a positive contribution to the efforts that many countries are undertaking to modernize their customs administrations. The handbook views a competent and well-organized customs service as one that successfully balances its various responsibilities to ensure a high level of compliance with revenue objectives and regulatory requirements while at the same time intervening as little as possible in the legitimate movement of goods and people across borders. The handbook recognizes that conditions differ greatly across countries, so that each customs administration will need to tailor its modernization efforts to national objectives, implementation capacities, and resource availability. -
Publication
Turkey : Economic Reform and Accession to the European Union
(Washington, DC: World Bank and Centre for Economic Policy Research, 2005)This volume analyzes the economic challenges confronting Turkey in its quest to accede to the European Union (EU). It focuses on the extent to which Turkey is ready to join the Single Market, comply with the EU's body of economic regulations and directives, the Acquis Communautaire, and meet the Maastricht criteria for fiscal, monetary, and exchange rate policies. This book also provides an assessment of Turkey's national program to meet the accession requirements. It describes briefly what Turkey needs to achieve on the economic policy front to satisfy the conditions for accession, the progress to date, and the likely consequences of implementing the full body of EU requirements. The book is divided into four parts: 1) An analysis of the macroeconomic policies for EU accession; 2) An analysis of the effects of integration on key sectors: agriculture; manufacturing; services industries, including banking, telecommunications, transportation, and natural gas; and network industries; 3) An exploration of key economic policy challenges, including labor market regulation, foreign direct investment challenges, and the costs and benefits of meeting the EU environmental Acquis; and 4) The quantification of the impact of EU accession and consideration of the welfare effects of integration. While the focus is on the specific situation of Turkey, the subject will be of value to all researchers with an interest in the challenges of deeper integration through regional agreements. -
Publication
Customs Modernization Initiatives : Case Studies
(Washington, DC: World Bank and Oxford University Press, 2004)This volume presents case studies of customs modernization initiatives in eight developing countries: Bolivia, Ghana, Morocco, Mozambique, Peru, the Philippines, Turkey, and Uganda. The purpose of these case studies was to obtain a firsthand view of how these countries undertook customs reforms and to assess their success. The overall lessons learned from these studies are presented in chapter 2 of the Customs Modernization Handbook (World Bank forthcoming), a companion volume that provides policymakers, practitioners, and project managers from development agencies with an overview of the key issues they need to address in preparing and implementing customs modernization initiatives. The audience for the Customs Modernization Handbook is customs officials who are called on to design and implement customs reform and modernization strategies, as well as staff members of the World Bank and of other multilateral and bilateral development agencies who support developing countries in implementing such strategies. All the case studies except for the one on Ghana were prepared using basically the same methodology, which aimed at identifying the origins of the reforms, the main drivers, and the outcomes. The Ghana case study is somewhat different, because it focuses on how the automation of trade and customs processes took the lead in the trade facilitation and customs reform. -
Publication
Agriculture and the WTO : Creating a Trading System for Development
(Washington, DC: World Bank and Oxford University Press, 2004)This publication explores the key issues and options in agricultural trade liberalization from a developing country perspective. Chapters cover market access, domestic support, export competition, quota administration methods, food security, biotechnology, intellectual property rights, agricultural trade under the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture (URAA), and many other subjects, always focusing on the question of how the outcome of the World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations can be made pro-development. Material is covered in summary and in comprehensive detail with supporting data tables, text boxes, figures, and a detailed table of contents. Many chapters have a substantial bibliography, listings of online resources, and tables summarizing the major points of WTO member country proposals that deal directly with each chapter topic.