Sweet and Sour Changes in Trade Regimes

Sugar is an important export for a number of developing countries, especially in the African, Caribbean and Pacific regions. In many of these countries, preferential access to the EU market has been a key factor to develop their sugar sectors. The recent and proposed changes to the international sugar trade regimes, particularly in the EU, are threatening this preferential access. We study the possible implications of such changes on ACP countries’ sugar production and exports by using a spatial price equilibrium model specifically developed for the sugar market. The results suggest that the effects of these changes are likely to vary according to the prevailing level of world sugar market price and according to whether ACP countries are current exporters to the EU.     

Regional Policy in the Americas: The EU Experience as a Guide for North-South Integration?

After ten years the negotiations on the largest free trade agreement to date, the Free Trade Area of the Americas, which is to include 34 countries, have still not resulted in an agreement. What can the countries involved learn, both positive and negative, from the experiences of the EU with regional policy?

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The author would like to thank Herman Hoen and J?rg Noll for their comments on an earlier version of this article.     

The Relations between the European Union and Latin America and the Caribbean

The EU is the second-largest trading partner (after the USA) of the Latin American and Caribbean countries (LAC). The European Commission is presently in the process of negotiating association agreements with three Latin American regional trading associations, a result of the fact that the EU has traditionally preferred multilateral treaties to bilateral ones as a means of its international trade policy. These negotiations have proved to be very complex and progress is difficult. Will the two-yearly meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the EU and the LAC in Peru in May 2008 take place under the sign of a return to a policy with more emphasis on bilateral agreements? The recent agreement with Brazil seems to point in this direction.     

Is the EU's labour market threatened by a wave of immigration?

As the accession negotiations continue between the European Union and the Central and Eastern European Countries, Germany in particular fears that granting free movement of labour to these countries might generate a wave of new entrants that could overwhelm its labour market. The following article uses migration determinants and draws on previous experience of integrating countries into the EU in an attempt to reach conclusions about migration patterns that may result from the forthcoming eastward enlargement.     

Trade Effects of the European Union's Service Directive: Contrasting ex ante Estimates with Empirical Evidence

One of the top priorities to improve the European Union's growth performance is the creation of a single market for services. The directive on services adopted by the Parliament and the Council by the end of 2006 aims at removing barriers to the free movement of service providers on the internal market. Previous studies quantified ex ante sizable effects of implementing the directive in its original form. This paper is a first attempt to evaluate ex post the trade effects induced by a directive – which excludes the country‐of‐origin principle – by performing a difference‐in‐difference‐(in‐differences) estimator on a sample of EU‐ and non‐EU countries in the period 2004 to 10. We account for non‐tariff trade barriers and the endogeneity of regional trade agreements and find that the service directive adds to a reallocation of business services trade within the EU. Accounting for the trade effect of past deregulations, the EU directive fosters a deeper integration of the new member states into the European service value‐added‐chain and promotes business service exports from third countries towards the EU significantly more than trade of country pairs in the control group. The reorientation of the EU‐15 towards the new members is in turn associated with less intense intra‐EU‐10 businesses, while business trade between EU‐15 members is not significantly affected.     

The EU own resources system — Reform needs and options

The most prominent and debated issues in the negotiations on the next Multiannual Financial Framework for the EU for the period 2014–2020 were the overall budget volume, the structure of expenditures and the continuation of the rebates for (some) net contributor countries. However, the system of the EU’s own resources was hardly addressed in the negotiations, although it is one of the most important obstacles to reform. This article reviews the most important deficits of the current system of own resources and assesses the most substantial reform proposal which has been advocated for years by the European Commission, namely to fi nance part of the EU budget through EU taxes.     

Preference Erosion – The Case of Everything But Arms and Sugar

While the European Union's Everything But Arms (EBA) agreement has granted unlimited preferential access to the European market for the least developed countries (LDCs) since 2001, the sugar sector has been exempted for the first years. Only from 2009 on, the LDCs were entitled to export an unlimited amount of sugar to the EU, receiving the intervention price. The expected increase in sugar imports led the EU to substantially reduce the intervention price, besides other measures. This caused a disadvantage for countries which had been granted preferential access to the European market already: the African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) countries. Our paper quantifies this erosion of preferences, employing a gravity framework. In terms of methodology we are addressing two fundamental problems well known in the gravity literature. The occurrence of excess zeros in the dependent variable of such disaggregated data is tackled with the employment of the scale‐independent negative binomial quasi generalised pseudo maximum likelihood estimator. The problem of identification is addressed by modelling the policy change with the continuous preference margin instead of using dummy variables. We find that preference erosion did occur. The ACP countries were indeed negatively affected by the consequences following the introduction of the EBA.     

Collected Customs Duties: The Level of Taxation on Imports Applied by the US and the EU

Relating the collected customs duty to the value of imports enables the estimation of a rate of applied duty that takes into account all pricing components and their use. Indeed, this ad valorem equivalent integrates the complex dimensions of customs duties, the measures of exemption and suspension, and those concerning preferential regimes. Processing collected duties for all the products reveals that the 1.5 per cent rate of duty actually applied in 2003 is the same for the EU and the US. Nevertheless, it appears that the US taxes more the least developed countries (LDCs) and developing countries than does the EU. Thus, setting aside those products which enter free of duty, the rate of taxation applied by the US is 15 per cent and 6.2 per cent respectively with regards to LDCs and developing countries, whereas in the EU it is only 3.7 per cent and 4.1 per cent. In the US market the sectors that are the most highly taxed upon importation are textiles, apparel and clothing, cotton and articles of leather, whereas in the EU it is more agricultural and food products (fruits and preserves, meats, sugars and cereals).     

EU/ACP Economic Partnership Agreements: Impact, Options and Prerequisites

The EU and the African, Caribbean and Pacific countries (ACP) are presently renegotiating their trade relations. Behind these negotiations are the fundamental conflict between the existing arrangement and multilateral trade rules, the frustration regarding poor ACP trade performance, the ineffectiveness of trade and trade-related ACP policies, and the inefficiency of corresponding EU assistance. This article highlights the fundamentals of the envisaged Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) between the EU and the ACP countries, sums up previous estimates of their probable economic impact, discusses policy options for ACP countries and sheds light on basic prerequisites, particularly on institutional conditions, that should be fulfilled to ensure the success of EPAs.     

从战略性贸易政策的视角来看欧盟食糖政策

食糖产业是一种特殊产业,产糖国政府在食糖生产、消费以及贸易方面的干预使食糖市场成为世界上扭曲最严重的市场之一。近几年来,要求欧盟进行食糖体制改革的呼声很大,关于食糖贸易的纠纷也时有发生,因此,本文特别选择食糖产业作为研究对象,分析欧盟国家如何通过战略性贸易政策来保护本国(区域)的食糖产业,使其在市场竞争和国际贸易中处于一种人为的优势地位。     

Tariff Preferences,WTO Negotiations and the LDCs: The Case of the ‘Everything But Arms’ Initiative

By assessing the impact of the recently adopted ‘Everything But Arms’ (EBA) initiative of the EU on the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and by showing how further multilateral trade liberalisations erode the EBA preferences and impact the LDCs, this paper attempts to uncover the LDCs’ difficult positions in the WTO trade negotiations. Due to its limited product coverage and previous preferences granted by the EU, welfare impacts of the EBA on the LDCs are shown to be small and the bulk of these gains are associated with the ‘sensitive’ products that are subject to gradual liberalisations. Moreover, these small gains are likely to disappear if the EU conducts trade policy reforms in fulfilling its WTO obligations, resulting in an actually worse‐off situation for the LDCs. Extending the analysis to a multilateral trade liberalisation scenario reinforces the above results that the LDCs may well lose due to preference erosion and higher world market prices. It concludes that other development assistance measures from developed countries should be made available to the LDCs to ease their dependency on trade preferences and to foster their supply capacities. The LDCs themselves should attempt to integrate the duty and quota‐free market access status contained in the EBA into a binding WTO agreement to secure a stable trading environment. But more importantly, in order to solve the difficulties at the root these countries should actively engage in reforming their own trade policies.     

Making EU Trade Agreements Work: The Role of Rules of Origin

A key element of the EU's free trade and preferential trade agreements is the extent to which they deliver improved market access and so contribute to the EU's foreign policy objectives towards developing countries and neighbouring countries in Europe, including the countries of the Balkans. Previous preferential trade schemes have been ineffective in delivering improved access to the EU market since only a small proportion of the available preferences have actually been utilised. The main reason for this is probably the very restrictive rules of origin that the EU imposes, coupled with the costs of proving consistency with these rules. If the EU wants the ‘Everything but Arms’ agreement and free trade agreements with countries in the Balkans to generate substantial improvements in access to the EU market for products from these countries then it will have to reconsider the current rules of origin and implement less restrictive rules backed up by a careful safeguards policy..     

Climate policy challenges after the Kyoto Protocol enters into force

The Kyoto Protocol on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions can finally come into force now that Russia has signed it. What has been the trend of emissions in the individual industrial countries in recent years? What options do the countries have? What EU strategy should be chosen for the coming negotiations on the climate regime after 2012?     

Canada Finance Minster： Welcome China＇s Investment in Canada

To forward the relationship between China and Canada in financial and trade sectors and strengthen the cooperation in avoiding the worse impact of international financial crisis, Canadian financial high-level leaders involving Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney, Canada＇s Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty, Federal Superintendent of Financial Institutions Julie Dickson, as well as five major banks and the two biggest insurance companies in Canada, who are looking to strengthen and expand business ties with China, visited China from August 8 to August 14, 2009. Also they send warm invitations to China enterprises to invest and to be listed in Canada. This visit is a preparation for Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper＇s coming visit to China in November.     

Chile's Trade and Regional Integration Policy: An Assessment

This paper examines the economics, politics and political economy of Chile's trade and regional integration (RI) policies, and reaches the following conclusions. First, Chile is likely to obtain static and dynamic benefits from a free trade agreement (FTA) with the US, though the benefits depend crucially on the extent to which its market access to the US improves and on the costs of implementing the intellectual property rights agreement and of enforcing the rules of origin. Second, potential benefits are more doubtful with respect to FTAs with MERCOSUR and the Andean Pact and Central American countries.Third, Chile should complement its ongoing negotiations with the EU by negotiating FTAs with key Asian countries.Fourth, Chile should bind all its tariffs at the WTO at the applied MFN uniform tariff rate. Fifth, the uniform MFN tariff should be reduced below six percent after 2003.     

Europe — A pioneer in greenhouse gas emissions trading

The decision on the EU directive for emissions trading in June 2003 makes Europe a pioneer in the large-scale application of market instruments to climate policy. This development would have been unthinkable five years ago. The negotiations provide a textbook example of public choice theory in practice. We describe the crucial points of the recent and upcoming legislation process at the levels of the EU and the Member States, the latter with a focus on Germany. The timetable for the enforcement of the emissions trading directive at the national level seems very tight—especially when considering the likely manoeuvres by several stakeholder groups.     

Market Constellations and Macroeconomic Policymaking: Institutional Impacts on Economic Performance

The following article presents a broad outline of a market participation theory of economic policy and attempts to determine how macroeconomic demand management can be used to influence market constellations. On that basis it then inquires into how far macroeconomic governance can be used to explain the different growth and employment performances of selected EU countries.

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The author gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Hans B?ckler foundation. This paper is part of a larger project on “Employment systems in international comparison”. The author’s thanks also go to Andrew Watt, Hansj?rg Herr and Carol Hogg for fruitful comments. However, the usual caveats apply.     

Anti‐dumping: A Growing Problem in International Trade

This paper discusses the issue of anti‐dumping (AD) proliferation. AD is used more frequently, by more countries, and against more products than ever in its history. I review AD filing patterns with an emphasis on the scope of countries and industries seeking protection. Recent trends suggest that the widespread embrace of AD protection makes the prospect for AD reform increasingly unlikely. AD is no longer being used solely by high‐income developed countries. It is increasingly being used by middle‐income and even lower‐income countries. New users have chosen to use AD very intensively. Per dollar of imports the new users have filed AD cases up to 15–20 times more frequently than the traditional AD users such as the US and EU. The evolving set of AD users complicates AD negotiations. In the near term, strong opposition by the US and EU makes reform a highly unlikely outcome. In the longer run, rising use of AD against the US and EU could conceivably weaken their support for AD; yet, the same trends that might finally cause the US and EU to realise AD is a failed policy will likely make reform impossible.     

Green intentions under the blue flag: Exploring differences in EU consumers’ willingness to pay more for environmentally‐friendly products

Recent research on consumer social responsibility highlights the need to examine psychological drivers of environmentally‐friendly consumption choices in a global context. This article investigates consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) more for environmentally‐friendly products across 28 European Union (EU) countries, using a sample of 21,514 consumers. A multigroup structural equation modeling analysis reveals significantly different patterns and relationships, in how (a) subjective knowledge about the product's environmental impact, (b) environmental product attitudes, and (c) the perceived importance of the products’ environmental impact influence consumers’ WTP more for environmentally‐friendly products across countries. The hypothesized model predicts WTP for 20 out of 28 countries and the findings show that a “one‐size‐fits‐all” approach is inadequate in capturing the heterogeneity of EU consumers. Hosfstede's cultural dimensions of uncertainty tolerance and individualism explain differences in WTP for environmentally‐friendly products across EU countries. Business, marketing communications, and policy making implications are discussed.