Книги

Работа посвящена анализу государственного регулирования внешней торговли сельскохозяйственной продукцией; опубликована в книге « Агропродовольственная политика и международная торговля: российский аспект ». Книга написана по материалам исследований Аналитического центра АПЭ в области внешней торговли агропродовольственными товарами и государственного регулирования этой торговли.

Публикация "Перспективы вступления России в ВТО" включена в книгу « Агропродовольственная политика и международная торговля: российский аспект ». Книга написана по материалам исследований Аналитического центра АПЭ в области внешней торговли агропродовольственными товарами и государственного регулирования этой торговли.

In this paper we use a general equilibrium model to examine the effects of international quota transfer when a quota restricts world commodity production whilst the trade in an intermediate good is not regulated. The analysis shows that, when the quota regime is not internationally transferable, intermediate input trade substitutes for final good trade. In these circumstances, the distortions are lower than expected. International quota transfer increases world welfare proportionally to quota rent gap. Welfare distribution is also conditioned by commodity terms of trade and, particularly, by the outcome of the intermediate good price.

The paper shows how analyses assuming perfect competition can yield a distorted estimation of the expected effects of a trade liberalization when market imperfections exist. The analytical framework adopted is very simple and three extreme imperfect market structures are considered. In the first case, the exporting country maximizes its producer and consumer surplus by intervening in the world market. The second market imperfection considered is the existence of a private firm playing the role of “pure middleman” in the world market. Then the case of a producer-owned marketing board which is granted exclusive export authority is addressed. It is shown that under all three scenarios, if perfect competition is assumed when market imperfections exist, the impact of a tariff reduction on prices and volume traded is overestimated. A ranking of the size of such distortions in the three cases analyzed is provided. Finally, it is proved that when a private firm exerts monopoly and monopsony power in the world market, both the importing and the exporting countries may well be better off if, rather than making a move towards trade liberalization, the importing country “compensates” the exporting country by means of a direct transfer.

Авторы книги исследуют эффект от либерализации мировой торговли продукцией сельского хозяйства. Рассматривается современное состояние торговли сельскохозяйственной продукцией и проблемы либерализации, изменение структуры мировых продовольственных рынков, политика протекционизма сельского хозяйства развитыми странами, моделируется ситуация либерализации торговли, рассчитываются потери и выгоды от данной политики.

В книге анализируется современная ситуация на рынке пшеницы, основные страны экспортёры и импортёры, даётся прогноз развития международного рынка. Авторы уделяют внимание таким странам, как Россия и Китай, чья роль на мировом рынке пшеницы значительно изменилась за последнее время. Анализируются и стратегии традиционных экспортёров пшеницы на мировом рынке - США, ЕС, Канады, Аргентины и Австралии. Поведение и развитие рынка пшеницы рассматривается через призму международных торговых соглашений. Под редакцией Д.Антл и В.Смит.

Сборник работ по теме продовольственной безопасности в развивающихся странах. Рассматриваются проблемы недоедания, бедности, состояния предложения и спроса на продовольствие, политика государств и проведение альтернативные политических мер на микро- и макро- уровнях.

Rural growth is necessary for reducing rural poverty. But rural regions cannot generate sustained growth in agricultural demand unless they trade with cities, neighboring countries, and the rest of the world. That is the first problem. The second is that world trade in agricultural and agro-industrial products has grown slower than general trade—and developing countries have not been able to capture as large a share of trade growth in agriculture as in industry. This has constrained agricultural growth and diversification in the developing world.

We argue here that developing countries will have to continue their agricultural policy reforms. But the main focus has to be on the constraints on agricultural trade imposed by developed countries—and on the prospects for reducing them in the current round of WTO negotiations. Export subsidies should be outlawed. Domestic producer subsidies reduced. Access under tariff quotas increased. Tariff escalation on processed agricultural products removed. And the level and the dispersion of bound tariffs on agricultural imports reduced.

In the wake of the November 2001 Ministerial Conference in Doha, the positions of most members of the World Trade Organisation diverge, reflecting a large extent of disagreement within the organisation. This paper attempts to organise these positions and thereby inspire a debate on the possibility of collusion in the coming round of trade negotiations with a particular focus on the options of developing countries. Members’ positions on a range of issues identified as important in the coming round are rated and used as inputs in a correlation analysis and two forms of cluster analyses to identify potential alliances between members with reasonably similar positions. The paper identifies nine clusters of countries that are internally similar. Among these clusters, the positions of most developing countries are most similar to the positions of the so-called Cairns group and the US, whereas the European Union and Norway are significantly isolated and positioned far away from the developing countries. The paper concludes that developing countries have opportunities of forming alliances with specific developed countries in order to promote their trade objectives in the coming round of negotiations.

This paper provides a summary measure of the possible new commitments in the area of market access undertaken by the European Union and the United States, using the Trade Restrictiveness Index (TRI) as the tariff aggregator. Indicators such as the TRI, based on welfare theory, integrate economic behavioural assumptions within a balance of trade framework. We take the 2000 bound tariffs as the starting point and attempt to assess how much liberalisation in agriculture could be achieved in the European Union and the United States as a result of the present negotiations. We compute the index for agricultural commodity aggregates assuming a specific (Constant Elasticity of Substitution) functional form for import demand. The present levels of the TRI under the actual commitments of the Uruguay Round are computed and compared with three hypothetical cases: a repetition of the same set of commitments of the Uruguay Round, a uniform 36 percent reduction of each tariff, an harmonization formula based on the “sliding scale” scheme. This makes it possible to infer how reducing tariff dispersion would help improve market access in future trade agreements.

A theory-based graphical analysis of WTO’s trade liberalization policies (opening of close-economy to international trade and cuts in price-supports, import-tariffs and exportsubsidies) suggests that most of such policies would yield net social gains to the society, as a whole. The adverse effects and losses in producer surpluses of some of the policies would be balanced out by greater gains in consumer surpluses and vice versa. Losses in producer surpluses due to cuts in price supports and import tariffs are also expected to be partially subsided by reductions in export subsidies mainly granted by the USA and EU; hence, policies need to be enforced, not in isolation, but in a simultaneous fashion. Trade liberalization would help minimize control of individuals on trade, leave less room for individual policy makers, tax collectors and interest groups to exploit situations in their own interest and lead the economy to be run in accordance with the supply and demand forces based on the last lasting general tendency of human nature. This would help to achieve a sustainable and stable agricultural growth; however, more durable sustained growth would depend as how effectively trade liberalization is pursued and enforced the world over. Opening of closed economy for exportables, and withdrawal of export subsidies by foreign exporters would be proproducers and would directly contribute to poverty alleviation. Opening of economy for importables, withdrawal of price supports and tariff-cuts on imports would yield savings to consumers and would positively contribute towards poverty reduction.

This paper proposes a partial equilibrium displacement model that differentiates wheat according to its end-use and country of origin to investigate the impact of alternative European trade policies on wheat supply and demand in France. Transmission, demand and supply elasticities are estimated for each class and origin of wheat. Simulation results show that rebalancing trade protection across wheat classes encourages domestic supply of high quality wheat and displaces imports from North America.

The collapse of the former Soviet Union has led to a sharp decline in the trading of agricultural products between its successor states. There have been attempts to revive these trade relations by means of bilateral and regional trade agreements. In addition, almost all member states of the CIS are in the process of negotiating accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). Because of its size and agricultural production potential, the Russian Federation is of primary importance in this respect. The integration of the Russian Federation in the world economy, which is expected to result from its accession to the WTO, will have a sizeable impact not only on its own agricultural sector, but also on the world markets for agricultural products.

Using a partial equilibrium model of world agriculture, we investigate the multilateral removal of all border taxes and farm programs and their distortion of world agricultural markets. These distortions have significant terms-of-trade effects. World trade is also significantly impacted by both types of distortions. Trade expansion is substantial for most commodities, especially dairy, meats, and vegetable oils. Net agricultural and food exporters (Brazil, Australia, and Argentina) emerge with expanded exports; whereas net importing countries with limited distortions before liberalization are penalized by higher world markets prices and reduced imports. The US gains significant export shares in livestock products and imports more dairy products. Without protection and domestic subsidies, the EU loses many of its livestock and dairy export markets.

We analyse the evolving pattern of Hungary.s agri-food trade using recently developed empirical procedures based on the classic Balassa index and its symmetric transformation. The extent of trade specialisation exhibits a declining trend; Hungary lost comparative advantage for a number of product groups over the 1990s. The indices of specialisation have also tended to converge. For particular product groups, the picture is mixed: indices are reasonably stable for product groups with comparative disadvantage, but those with weak to strong comparative advantage show significant variation. The results reinforce the finding of a general decrease in specialisation, but do not support the idea of self-reinforcing mechanisms, emphasised strongly in much of the endogenous growth and trade literature.