Книги

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.

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 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.