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
Trade Finance during the Great Trade Collapse
(World Bank, 2011-06-22)The bursting of the subprime mortgage market in the United States in 2008 and the ensuing global financial crisis were associated with a rapid decline in global trade. The extent of the trade collapse was unprecedented: trade flows fell at a faster rate than had been observed even in the early years of the great depression. G-20 leaders held their first crisis-related summit in November 2008. The goal was to understand the root causes of the global crisis and to reach consensus on actions to address its immediate effects. In the case of trade, a key question concerned the extent to which a drying up of trade finance caused the observed decline in trade flows. This book brings together a range of projects and studies undertaken by development institutions, export credit agencies, private bankers, and academics to shed light on the role of trade finance in the 2008-09 great trade collapse. It provides policy makers, analysts, and other interested parties with analyses and assessments of the role of governments and institutions in restoring trade finance markets. A deeper understanding of the complexity of trade finance remains critical as the world economy recovers and the supply of trade finance improves. The international community continues to know too little about the fragility of low income economies in response to trade finance developments and shocks, as well as about the ability and conditions of access to trade finance by small and medium enterprises and small banks in developing countries. Similarly, there is uncertainty regarding the impact on trade finance of recent changes in the third Basel regulatory framework. -
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. -
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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? -
Publication
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
Agricultural Trade Reform and the Doha Development Agenda
(Washington, DC: World Bank and Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)Agriculture is yet again causing contention in international trade negotiations. It caused long delays to the Uruguay round in the late 1980s and 1990s, and it is again proving to be the major stumbling block in the World Trade Organization's (WTO) Doha round of multilateral trade negotiations (formally known as the Doha Development Agenda, or DDA). This study builds on numerous recent analyses of the Doha Development Agenda and agricultural trade, including five very helpful books that appeared in 2004. One, edited by Aksoy and Beghin (2004), provides details of trends in global agricultural markets and policies, especially as they affect nine commodities of interest to developing countries. Another, edited by Ingco and Winters (2004), includes a wide range of analyses based on papers revised following a conference held just before the aborted WTO trade ministerial meeting in Seattle in 1999. The third, edited by Ingco and Nash (2004), provides a follow-up to the broad global perspective of the Ingco and winters volume: it explores a wide range of key issues and options in agricultural trade reform from a developing-country perspective. The fourth, edited by Anania, Bowman, Carter, and McCalla (2004), is a comprehensive, tenth-anniversary retrospective on the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture and numerous unilateral trade and subsidy reforms in developed, transition, and developing economies. And the fifth, edited by Jank (2004), focuses on implications for Latin America.