Книги

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 brings time series techniques to bear on the relationships between the prices of the principal types of wheat traded internationally. In all, the relationships between eleven wheat prices (categorised by wheat quality, harvest date and port of despatch) are scrutinised to uncover the structure of the wheat market implicit in the behaviour its prices reveal. The statistical evidence supports the notion of a highly integrated market that is segmented according to wheat strength . the principal determinant of end-use. Three segments are identified: a market for "strong" (bread-making) wheat, another for "weak" (confectionary products- making) wheat and a third for medium strength wheat suitable for unleavened breads and noodles. Whilst informative, market integration - detected by cointegration among prices . is not altogether surprising, yet the presence of cointegration implies a causal structure, which is of more cogent interest. Among a number of complementary techniques, linkages are uncovered using an innovative concept of irreducible cointegration vectors (Davidson 1998, Barassi et al 2001) which provides new evidence on price linkages. Statistical evidence is robust and not test-dependent. Specifically, we find a dominant price leader in each sub-market. In terms of its pricing, the EU is found to play a passive role in the world market, confirming a widely held view.