Regulating State Trading Enterprises in the World Trade Organization: An Urgent Need for Change? Evidence from the 2003–2004 U.S.–Canada Grain Dispute

Article XVII of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade is the main World Trade Organization (WTO) vehicle for regulating trade-distorting policies implemented through state trading enterprises (STEs). The effectiveness of Article XVII depends on how WTO dispute panels and the Appellate Body interpret the provisions. This study examines the 2003 WTO trade dispute case between the United States and Canada over Canadian grain imports and the practices of the Canadian Wheat Board, an export STE. We conclude that the WTO panel and Appellate Body rationales for their findings demonstrate that Article XVII needs substantial revision for the WTO to discipline STE trade-distorting practices.     

State Trading Enterprises: Some Legal and Conceptual Issues

State trading may become an important issue in the current WTO negotiations on agricultural trade as witnessed by some of the recent proposals for negotiating agendas. On the premise that state trading enterprises can hinder market access in importing countries and can affect export competition, it has been proposed that state trading enterprises should be pan of the negotiations. We consider the current status of state trading enterprises in the GATT framework and summarize the list of concerns relating to the effects which they may have on agricultural trade. Drawing on some recent research, we show that state trading enterprises are likely to influence market access and export competition under trade liberalization when measured relative to a benchmark of imperfect competition.     

The Chinese Enigma: Impacts of WTO Accession Upon Canadian and U.S. Exports and Imports

China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) is an important milestone in the integration of this nation into the world economy. Substantial reduction in trade barriers by China, one of the world's largest and most rapidly growing economies, is expected to have a significant impact, both on China itself and on the global economy. In assessing likely impacts on trade between China and North America of China joining the WTO, a priori one might expect new opportunities for China in labor intensive activities/products, while for the United States and for Canada one might expect added export market opportunities, as China grows, in activities/products that require land, resources and capital. However, the extent to which China and its trading partners will benefit from China's increasing integration into the global economy will largely depend on the internal changes in policy and infrastructure that may be adopted by China. China has embarked on a process of economic reform, but the speed and extent to which this continues to be pursued will affect this nation's ability to capitalize on its comparative advantages and to meet new challenges that are associated with the opportunities of access to a larger market. The difficulty of forecasting such internal changes means that China continues to be a major source of uncertainty in projecting world markets and trade flows. This uncertainty is particularly evident for trade in agricultural products     

《日美贸易协定》对我国农产品贸易的影响及对策

本文在分析日美农产品关税、贸易和在《日美贸易协定》中降税情况的基础上,采用GTAP模型定量分析《协定》实施对我国农产品贸易的影响。结果显示:《协定》的实施将对我国农业总体发展产生一定冲击,日美相互减免农产品关税将带来一定程度的贸易转移效应,尤其对我国出口日本的蔬果和畜产品影响尤为明显。结合我国自贸区谈判和农业发展情况,本文提出积极推动多双边农业谈判、培育出口竞争优势、借鉴日本经验灵活处理农产品降税、利用自贸试验区积极对接农业国际规则等政策建议。     

Will China Become a Major Force in World Food Markets?

From the perspective of China's trading partners, few policy issues are as important as China's emergence onto world agricultural markets. In this essay, we argue that if China is to become a modern developed country, a massive structural transformation of China's agricultural sector must occur. We offer a forward-looking vision of China's food economy and its links with the world in the 21st century. We believe that gains from specialization when China moves to a country with specialized family farms will be huge compared to the returns that have resulted from decollectivization. Following a structural revolution in China's agricultural sector, China will become a major force in world food markets. This transformation will be characterized by land reform, a massive shift of labor out of agriculture, expanded farm size, a significant change in regional cropping patterns, more interprovincial trade, and greater international trade. This structural transformation will occur as long as there is strong economic and political pressure to raise agricultural labor productivity, liberalize markets, boost the rule of law, and increase per capita farm incomes relative to urban incomes.     

China and Taiwan access to the World Trade Organization: implications for U.S. agriculture and trade

This paper investigates the impact of China's and Taiwan's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) on U.S. and world agricultural trade by means of a 12-region, 14-sector Computable General Equilibrium model for world trade and production. The simulation results show that integrating China and Taiwan into the global trading system could induce more competition on labor-intensive Products and reduce their prices. It could drive up the demand for capital and skill-intensive manufactured goods, thus further improving industrial countries' terms of trade. The expansion of labor-intensive sectors in China could also induce contraction in agricultural exports from China and increase its net agricultural imports by as much as US$9 billion annually, causing food and agricultural exports from other regions to increase. Total U.S. food and agricultural exports could increase by about US$2.4 billion annually, with the non-grain crop sectors gaining the most. The biggest winner from China's WTO accession is China itself. WTO membership could bring a net welfare gain of about US$30 billion a year for China, a substantial benefit compared with the gains for the USA (US$8.5 billion).     

Agricultural Trade Liberalisation in the 21st Century: Has It Done the Business?

Based on a novel, detailed, time‐consistent tariff database taking account of import protection developments in the agricultural sector since 2001, we propose a statistical decomposition of the changes in the various types of tariffs. The results show that the multilateral system has played a limited role in trade liberalisation over the period. Many countries have continued to apply much lower tariffs on agricultural products than their WTO ceilings. Moreover, there has been substantial unilateral dismantling of tariffs over the period, so that much of the liberalisation took place outside WTO and regional agreements. The number of regional trade agreements has surged, but their impact on applied agricultural tariffs has been limited. Finally, we investigate the tariffs, trade and production implications for food and agricultural products of two extreme scenarios in the future development of trade negotiations: an ambitious surge of regional agreements and a trade war within the WTO context.     

Integrated regional impact assessment of agricultural trade and domestic environmental policies

It remains challenging to derive general findings and conclusions from either economic theory or empirical studies on the relationship between international trade and the regional environment. Consequently, we aim to analyse environmental effects of agricultural trade policies in the Austrian Marchfeld region. We apply an integrated modelling framework that accounts for heterogeneity in agricultural production and environmental outcomes. Scenario analysis is applied to assess regional impacts of different trade policy scenarios. Sensitivity analyses reveal the relative influence of model parameters on outputs. The results indicate that lower domestic tariffs have small beneficial effects on the regional environment. The regional environmental impacts highly depend on the changes in world crop prices through global trade agreements. A laissez-faire market scenario that includes the elimination of trade barriers and agri-environmental payments (AEPs) leads to substantial environmental deterioration. Hence, the alignment of AEPs with WTO trading rules remains an important issue in the trade and environment debate.     

On Exporting by Import State Traders and Peculiar Effects of Negotiated Minimum Access Commitments

It has been alleged that exportation by import state trading enterprises (ISTEs) must involve unfair trade practices. We show that such exporting may result from a rational use of market power by a sufficiently protected price discriminating ISTE. We argue that the flawed design and implementation of the tarffication process initiated in the last GATT agreement is providing ISTEs with incentives to export. The tariffication of import quotas and other related import restrictions was dirty in the sense that it permitted the setting of prohibitively high tariffs on many commodities. More importantly, it failed to eliminate quantitative trade barriers as the previous import quotas were replaced by minimum access commitments (MACs). In this paper, we use a simple partial equilibrium framework to explore the trade and welfare consequences of trade liberalization through tariff reductions and MAC enlargements under the small country assumption when domestic production and imports are controlled by an ISTE. We show that tariff reductions and MAC enlargements have very different effects on the behavior of the ISTE. MAC enlargements induce inefficient trade by encouraging the profit maximizing ISTE to increase its exports. In terms of welfare, MAC enlargements are immiser-izing. We conclude that tariff reductions are to be preferred to MAC increases as a means to liberalize trade .     

BRIC Agricultural Policies Through a WTO Lens

This article examines the agricultural policies of Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) through the prism of the disciplines on agricultural domestic support in the World Trade Organization (WTO). Although the BRIC are often grouped collectively as an emerging force in the world economy, divergent agricultural interests are reflected in different approaches towards agricultural policy both through international dispute settlement and notification of their own support. We examine the support notified to the WTO for verification of compliance with their legal commitments, which under the complex WTO rules often differs significantly from measurement of support in economic terms. We note the resulting difficulties of these disciplines in establishing limits on trade‐distorting support. Implications of a Doha agreement are examined. Although the prospect of adoption of new Doha disciplines has become remote, the negotiated provisions are informative about the future policy space the BRIC sought to maintain. Russia’s domestic support commitments under its 2012 WTO accession extend the international disciplines but share the complexity of the other cases.     

中国农产品贸易角色变迁：1949—2019

[目的]中国是农产品生产大国,同时也是农产品消费大国和贸易大国。1949—2019年中国农产品对外贸易历经70年的风雨,其在不同的历史阶段扮演着举足轻重的角色,通过回顾与总结农产品贸易发展历史,为未来中国农产品贸易发展提供经验借鉴。[方法]通过查阅历史文献,运用详实的历史统计数据进行分析。[结果]以重大历史事件为节点,将1949年以来农产品贸易发展史划分为3个阶段:即1949年至改革开放前夕、改革开放至入世前夕、入世至今。对应地,农产品贸易在中国经济发展中的主要角色被归纳为出口创汇、出口创汇与调剂余缺、优化资源配置与全面对外开放。文章着重探讨了各个阶段农产品贸易角色变迁的缘由、农产品贸易的特点。[结论]回顾70年农业贸易发展历史,中国农业贸易发展成就瞩目,发展历程艰辛曲折,中国现有农业贸易结构是发挥比较优势的产物,未来农业的发展以及农业贸易的开展,仍需遵循比较优势原理开展。     

Brexit: How Will UK Agriculture Fare?

There is little doubt that Brexit would have significant implications for UK agriculture, a sector with strong trade links to the EU and strong reliance on CAP income support. This article reports preliminary results from employing a Computable General Equilibrium Model, a Partial Equilibrium Model and Farm Level Models to explore selected trade and domestic policy scenarios post‐Brexit. These allow for the estimation of changes in producer prices, production and farm incomes against a baseline scenario of continued EU membership. Under a Free Trade Agreement with the EU, agricultural impacts are relatively modest. By contrast, unilateral removal of import tariffs has significant negative impacts on prices, production and incomes. Adoption of the EU's WTO tariff schedule for all imports favours net importers (e.g. dairy) and harms net exporters (e.g. sheep). Given the strong dependence of most UK farms on direct payments, their removal worsens negative impacts of new trade arrangements and offsets positive impacts. Impacts vary across different types and sizes of farm, but also regionally. However, the period of adjustment to new trade and domestic policy conditions may prove very challenging for a large number of farm businesses.     

Special and differential treatment in the WTO agricultural negotiations: Analysis and policy recommendation

The on-going Doha Development Round under the World Trade Organization (WTO) has its main focus on development. This is due to the widespread disappointment with the results from the former Uruguay Round Agreement. Developing countries have not reaped the benefits of free trade. For this current Round to be a success, developing countries have to be more integrated in the multilateral trading system. One of the means of integrating is Special and Differential Treatment (SDT). SDT is a deviation from the basic principle of Most Favoured Nation, positing that developing countries can have more flexibility than others. This article investigates the positions on SDT made by WTO members. The analysis gives some insights into the negotiations. First, the analysis reveals the fact that the positions of WTO members are relatively close to each other. This could indicate that countries in fact agree or that sensitive areas are maintained as yet unaffected. Second, being able to sustain a certain level of tariff rates attracts most interest from developing countries. Third, higher income developing countries want to retain their right to support domestic producers. Finally, the article identifies the July Package right in the middle of the positions which indicate a future agreement.     

The Impact of an EU–US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Agreement on Biofuel and Feedstock Markets

We assess the impact of a potential TTIP bilateral free trade agreement on the EU and US bio‐economies (feedstock, biofuels, by‐products, and related competing crops) and major trade partners in these markets. The analysis develops a multi‐market model that incorporates bilateral trade flows (US to EU, EU to US, and similarly with third countries) and is calibrated to the OECD‐FAO baseline for 2013–2022 to account for recent policy decisions. The major policy reforms from a TTIP involve tariff and TRQ liberalisation and their direct contractionary impact on US sugar supply, EU biofuel production, and indirect negative effect on US high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) production. EU sugar and isoglucose production expand along with US ethanol and biodiesel and oilseed crushing. EU sugar would flow to the US, US biofuels and vegetable oil to the EU. We further quantify non‐tariff measures (NTM) affecting these trade flows between the EU and the US. EU oilseed production contracts, and EU crushing expands with improving crushing margins following reduced NTM frictions. Our analysis reveals limited net welfare gains with most net benefits reaped by Brazil and not the two trading partners of the TTIP.     

The costs of global tariff barriers on wool products: 1997–2005

The Doha round of multilateral trade negotiations commits World Trade Organization (WTO) members to improving market access for both agricultural and nonagricultural goods. Tariff barriers on wool products represent a small but important subset of these negotiations. To inform the debate on the round, we analyze the distortionary effects of recent (1997–2005) tariff barriers on wool products using a model that applies a comprehensive analytical approach with regard to the production, trade, and consumption of wool products. We also account for any indirect effects of wool tariff barriers on the nonwool economy by incorporating the production, trade, and consumption of nonwool products, that is, the framework is a comparative‐static global general equilibrium model with a detailed representation of the world wool market. Changes in wool tariffs over 1997–2005 lead to positive welfare effects for most regions; Italy, China, and the UK are estimated to have gained the most from the changes. The results indicate that the nature of recent wool tariffs severely distort the size of wool industries in different regions. The changes in the output of wool commodities are extreme reflecting the discriminatory nature of the tariffs.     

Tariff Liberalisation,Price Transmission and Rural Welfare in China

China's tariff liberalisation as part of its WTO accession application and eventual agreement has been thoroughly analysed in the literature. However, much of this literature is based on forward‐looking ex‐ante analyses and few studies provide empirical evidence on its actual impact. We fill in this gap by evaluating empirically the welfare effects of China's actual tariff liberalisation on Chinese farmers during the 1997–2010 period. By estimating the domestic market price effects of China's tariff liberalisation and the associated wage earning effects, we find that on average Chinese farmers were able to gain more from reduced consumption prices than they would lose from reduced agricultural and wage income due to tariff liberalisation. Welfare gains over time are estimated to be positively correlated with the actual degrees of tariff liberalisation, implying that relatively more gains were realized immediately before and after China's WTO accession in 2001, as compared to the more recent period when relatively little liberalisation was carried out. Farmers’ rising non‐agricultural income and increasing consumption shares of non‐agricultural products are important determinants of these positive average welfare effects. Moreover, welfare gains from tariff liberalisation are shown to be distributed unevenly across Chinese provinces and income levels, with farmers located in coastal provinces and at higher income levels gaining more than their counterparts in remote provinces and at lower income levels.     

The Heterogeneous Effects of Standards on Agricultural Trade Flows

This article uses a theory‐based translog gravity model to investigate the heterogeneous effects of food standards on aggregate agricultural trade. We revisit the ‘standards‐as‐barriers‐to‐trade’ debate with a distinctive twist. In contrast to existing works, we show that standards reduce trade but even more so for countries that trade smaller volumes. Our identification strategy exploits the within‐country variation in specific trade concerns. We confirm that stricter importer standards are indeed trade‐restrictive. However, the estimated trade cost elasticity varies depending on how intensively two countries trade. Specifically, it decreases in magnitude with an increasing import share of the exporter in the importing country's total imports. The reason is simple but intuitive; bigger trading partners find it more profitable to invest in meeting the costs of importer‐specific standards. This work is novel in showing that the standards–trade debate misses out on an important heterogeneity driven by existing import shares. Liberalising non‐tariff measures will favour smaller trading partners more than well‐established ones.     

中国—东盟热带水果贸易及对中国热带水果产业影响研究

本文对中国—东盟自由贸易区建立以来中国与东盟国家热带水果的贸易现状及经济效应进行了分析。研究发现,早期收获计划及零关税政策的实施显著促进了中国热带水果及其加工品进口量的增长,丰富了中国热带水果消费市场,对东盟国家的贸易创造和贸易转移效应影响突出,也提高了中国热带水果贸易的经济效率,但同时却成为中国与东盟贸易逆差的根源。随着低价格东盟热带水果进口量的进一步增长,中国热带水果生产及加工产业将面临更严峻的挑战。     

我国特色果蔬国际贸易中存在的技术壁垒问题探析

我国是农业大国,农产品的国际贸易对我国经济发展具有较大的影响。随着我国农产品贸易出口量的增加,国外许多国家,尤其是发达国家开始制定许多措施来限制我国农产品的出口,其中技术壁垒对我国农产品出口产生很大的阻碍。为了更好地促进农产品贸易发展,我国逐渐将特色果蔬作为农产品贸易的主要竞争力,特色果蔬不仅具有较高的经济效益,其区域特色、品质特色及丰富的营养结构等优势更是顺应了消费者对农产品质量要求越来越高的新变化。文章通过阐述特色农产品与技术壁垒等的相关概念,进而分析我国特色果蔬国际贸易发展存在的相关问题,从不利与有利因素来研究技术壁垒对我国特色果蔬国际贸易带来的影响,以此为我国特色果蔬贸易的发展提出以下几点政策建议:(1)提高特色果蔬产品质量安全水平;(2)完善特色果蔬质量标准体系建设;(3)实现特色果蔬集约化生产与运输。     

世贸争端解决规则第21.5条的缺陷及改革

世界贸易组织"关于争端解决规则与程序的谅解协议"(简称DSU),是整个WTO司法程序最主要的法律依据,为解决国际贸易争端发挥了不可替代的作用。其第21.5条规定的对败诉成员裁决履行情况的复审规则,更是富有创新性的法律制度。然而实践表明,21.5条的规定不够成熟,存在好几处用语含义模糊不清与可操作性差的缺陷,影响到该条款作用的发挥。因此,需要进一步探讨未来如何通过修改立法对21.5条条文内容进行改革完善。