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).     

Trade liberalisation and greenhouse gas emissions: the case of dairying in the European Union and New Zealand*

The link between trade and the environment has aroused considerable interest both in terms of the impact of trade liberalisation on the environment, and also the impact of environmental policy on production and trade. Of key environmental concern at present is global warming and its association with greenhouse gas emissions. Agriculture is a sector of the economy that both contributes to, and will be affected by, climate change. This paper models the impact of agricultural trade liberalisation on greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture around the world, focusing particularly on the effects on New Zealand, a small economy highly dependent on agricultural trade. A partial equilibrium agricultural multicountry, multicommodity trade model is used for the analysis, extended to include physical production systems and their greenhouse gas emissions. Two simulations are performed: removal of agricultural policies in the EU and in all OECD countries. The results indicate that although producer returns in New Zealand increase, greenhouse gas emissions also increase significantly. EU producers face lower returns but also lower greenhouse gas emissions.     

Challenges of trade and agricultural development for East/Central Europe and states of the former USSR

The agricultural transition in Central and Eastern Europe and the former USSR reflects a fundamental change in development strategy, and will have a profound impact on agricultural trade. The greatest impact will be indirect, through agriculture's contribution to general economic reform and acceleration of regional and global growth. The direct impact on trade in food and fiber will in aggregate consist of a fall in net imports. Most of the decline in net imports will derive from reduction in demand and improved utilization. Potential for productivity increase is substantial, but not all of the increased productivity will be reflected in the traditional supply response of increased production. Instead marginal resources will shift out of farming, and producers will restructure and adopt new technologies in pursuit of lower costs. Shifts in the commodity composition of trade will occur, and the changes in grain and livestock markets will be greatest. If the reform is successful, the former Soviet Union could become a modest net grain exporter instead of a large importer. Wheat would be the leading export grain, and levels of wheat exports and corn imports could become quite sensitive to relative prices on world markets.     

Land use and economic effects of alternative biofuel policies in Brazil and the United States

Being the two largest ethanol producers in the world, biofuel policies in Brazil and the United States affect both their domestic markets and the global food and biofuel economy. In this article we develop a price endogenous mathematical programming model to simulate and analyze the impacts of biofuel mandates and trade distortions on land use, agricultural commodity and transportation fuel markets, and global environment. We find that an 80% increase in total biofuel production from its 103 billion liter baseline level to the mandated 183 billion liter level in 2022 can be achieved with less than 2% increase in total cropland use in both countries. In the United States, this would occur with cellulosic biofuels meeting nearly half of the biofuels consumed and produced largely on cropland pasture and corn ethanol meeting the rest of the mandate and resulting in a 2% increase in corn price. In Brazil, the expansion in sugarcane production would be achieved by reducing land under pasture and a marginal increase in intensification of livestock production. In the aggregate, biofuel policies increase economic surplus in both countries by 1% and redistribute the benefits from agricultural consumers to agricultural producers and the fuel sector. Finally, we also find that full implementation of the mandates in North America, China, and the European Union would reduce the global life‐cycle global greenhouse gas emissions by about 5%.     

Multifunctionality and Agricultural Trade Negotiations

Differing views of multifunctionality—attributing nonmarket benefits to agricultural production—continue to be an obstacle in World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations. Some nations see multifunctionality as justifying subsidies to agricultural production; others see it as disguised protection. This paper shows that while multifunctionality never justifies trade interventions, it can justify production subsidies or taxes. Recognizing that the subsidies or taxes can be economically efficient policies, nations must precisely define and value the externalities in order to design policies and defend those interventions in the WTO. Trade rules are developed that accommodate domestic policy intervention while preventing disguised protection.     

‘Deal’ or ‘No Deal’? Impacts of Alternative Post‐Brexit Trade Agreements on UK Agriculture

Brexit will have important implications for UK agricultural commodity markets due to potentially significant changes to trade flows. We quantify the sectoral impacts on UK agriculture of three illustrative scenarios, which capture a broad range of potential trade arrangements: Bespoke Free Trade Deal , WTO Default and Unilateral Trade Liberalisation . It is estimated that the projected market impacts are relatively small if the UK negotiates a Bespoke Free Trade Agreement with the EU. The projected impacts are much greater under the two other scenarios, which capture potential trade arrangements if ‘no deal’ is reached. The high tariffs imposed under the WTO default scenario lead to significant adjustments in trade between the UK and EU‐27, with the impact on the domestic UK market depending on whether the UK is a net importer or a net exporter of the relevant commodity. All sectors experience price and production declines under the trade liberalisation scenario in which the UK unilaterally sets tariffs on imports from both the EU‐27 and the rest of the world to zero; the impacts are particularly severe in the beef and sheep sectors where international competition is very strong.     

论实质公平理念下TWO农产品保障措施的变革

实质公平是农产品贸易的最终价值追求。由于发达国家与发展中国家农业发展阶段的不同,以及发达国家高额的国内支持和保护,当前的WTO农产品贸易规则对发展中国家来说实质上是不公平的。WTO一般保障措施(SG)由于难以照顾到农业的特殊性以及其高额的实施成本,难以保障当前农产品贸易的实质公平。WTO农产品特殊保障措施(SSG)是为应对乌拉圭回合谈判中各成员关税化改革的不同进度而设计的过渡性措施,实际上它主要保护发达国家的利益,亦不能保障当前农产品贸易的实质公平。为保障农产品贸易的实质公平,必须专为发展中国家创设新的机制,即WTO农产品特殊保障机制(SSM)。     

An Analysis of Removal of Agricultural Trade Barriers between the United States and Canada with Emphasis on the Southeast

A four-region, 23-commodity small world agricultural trade liberalization model within the SWOPSIM framework is used to measure the impact of tariff removal between the United States and Canada. The tariffs are simply defined as negative import subsidy equivalents in the model and are then removed from the trade prices. The model recalculates domestic supply and demand levels in all regions, rebalancing world trade, production, consumption and prices. In summary, the impacts of the Canada-U.S. Trade Agreement on selected commodity groups are significant. Canadian imports of beef and veal, poultry meat, soybean oil and fresh strawberries increase. Furthermore, the results indicate larger trade flows for selected products and declines in producer and consumer prices in Canada, U.S. and Southeast regions. Since the U.S. share of Canadian agricultural imports averaged 60% in the 1980s, the impact of trade liberalization will be greater in Canada in selected commodities than in the U. S. or the southeastern region, and Canadian dependence on the U.S. market will be increasing in the future. The tariff phaseout, together with a reduction in nontariff barriers and harmonizing of domestic agricultural policies, will create more export opportunities in selected commodities for both the United States and Canada, and will create the world's largest free trade market.     

Agricultural Trade Liberalization in a Multi-sector World Model

Impacts of agricultural and nonagricultural trade liberalization on agriculture are assessed in a multi-commodity, multi-country framework. By modeling simultaneously all goods sectors of the economy, we evaluate the importance of: (a) relative price changes between sectors, and (b) income and exchange-rate adjustments that follow trade liberalization in a world of floating rates. Specifically, we compare two cases using a static world policy simulation (SWOPSIM) model: agricultural multilateral liberalization and complete multilateral liberalization with floating exchange rates for all countries/regions. In both cases agricultural commodity prices tend to increase, an effect which is more pronounced when currency values adjust. The developing countries, in particular Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, have the most significant advances in agricultural and total production when exchange rates vary. Moreover, the gains from international trade are extended to all countries/regions explicitly specified in the model.     

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.     

Trade and agricultural development in the 1980s and the challenges for the 1990s: Asia

Asian developing countries have had varying experiences in trade and agricultural development in the 1980s, attributable in part to their differing stages of economic development and structural characteristics. Other important influences relate to the external economic environment and the policy choices made by their governments not only during the period but also in the preceding decade. The achievements of Asian developing countries under the adverse external conditions of the 1980s are discussed in terms of their macrocconomic and agricultural growth, the commodity structure of agricultural growth, their food production and trade, the expansion and diversification of their agricultural exports, and the policy and nonpolicy factors affecting them. Special attention is given to the role of policy reforms implemented in China and the South Asian countries, following similar policy developments in Northeast and Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s, toward greater openness in their trade regime and increased private-sector participation in the economy. These reforms have contributed to the observed acceleration in gup , agricultural, and export growth in the 1980s. However, macroeconomic imbalances have emerged that threaten the sustainability of economic liberalization in those countries. The major challenges for the 1990s also differ among the Asian developing countries. In the industrially advanced Northeast economies of Taiwan and South Korea, the primary need is to ease the transition of the remaining rural population as farm incomes continue to fall and workers move to industrial and service activities. This challenge has to be addressed in the context of growing external pressure to further open their domestic market for agricultural imports. Among the Southeast and South Asian countries, there is a need to reduce the existing policy biases against agriculture, particularly against export crop production. Moreover, China and the South Asian countries face the additional challenges of continuing to deregulate their trade regime and internal markets, and of promoting macroeconomic stability. Despite the external trend recently toward regionalism, Asian developing countries generally seem committed to an open trading system, on which in fact their past impressive economic performance has been predicated. An important challenge for them in the 1990s is to play an active role in arresting and reversing any protectionist tendencies arising from the formation of regional trading blocs and to support multilateral initiatives such as the Uruguay Round that promote global trade liberalization.     

The Effect of Carbon Taxes on Agricultural Trade

This study evaluates the implications of an existing carbon tax on international trade in the agricultural sector. Applying uniformly to all fossil fuels combusted within its borders, the province of British Columbia unilaterally introduced a carbon tax on July 1, 2008. In 2012, the province granted an exemption from the tax to certain agricultural sectors. Using commodity‐specific trade flows and exploiting cross‐provincial and intertemporal variation, we find little evidence that the carbon tax is associated with any meaningful effects on agricultural trade despite the sector being singled out as “at risk” by the provincial government. Our findings suggest that there is not compelling evidence to support exempting the agricultural sector from the tax. Discussion of potential policy remedies to address the tax's potential effects on firm profitability and international competitiveness is also included.     

Trade Creation and Diversion Effects of Preferential Trade Associations on Agricultural and Food Trade

Agricultural market distortions remain a major focus of contention in world trade negotiations. Estimates of the effects of liberalising current agricultural trade restrictions indicate an approximately $385 billion increase in global welfare, with the disproportionate share of the benefit being enjoyed by developing countries. In response to difficulties in adopting agricultural trade reforms, individual groups of countries have formed multiple bilateral and regional preferential trade agreements (PTA) to enhance trade among members. Few sectoral analyses exist of the effects on agricultural and food product trade of PTAs. This research uses a gravity model to isolate the effects of various PTAs on both intra‐ and extra‐bloc agricultural and food product trade for three time periods: 1995, 2000 and 2004. Findings strongly support PTA benefits in terms of increased intra‐bloc trade in both sectors. The findings also generally support trade creation in agricultural products. PTA membership was also associated with food trade creation in most cases, although diversion was observed for several associations composed primarily of developing countries.     

Fair Trade and Organic Agriculture in Developing Countries: A Review

Fair trade regimes and organic agricultural systems are 2 innovations that increasingly play an important role for agriculture in developing countries. Whereas fair trade regimes have their origin in the developing countries, organic agriculture was started in the rich countries and has only recently become popular in the Third World. Both innovations can be mutually reinforcing as fair trade often combined with organic production standards opens up new market prospects. In this article we explore the opportunities and constraints of marketing organic products from developing countries under fair trade regimes. Based on available literature, we review evidence of the magnitude of organic production and fair trade systems in developing countries. We also propose a framework for studying the impact of fair traded organically produced commodities using the case of black pepper in India. The framework will generate testable hypotheses regarding the 2 innovations.     

Global Commodity Chains and African Export Agriculture

The last twenty years or so have seen a new conjuncture in international trade in tropical agricultural products. That conjuncture combines both changes in the organization of the (Northern) manufacturer and consumer segments of the global commodity chains for those products, and in marketing arrangements in their (Southern) countries of origin, associated with structural adjustment and liberalization. This introductory essay provides the context for the case studies that follow, first by introducing some of the key concepts and analytical issues in the global commodity chain (GCC) approach and other recent relevant literature such as the French 'convention' theory. It then sketches an historical framework for examining international trade in tropical agricultural products, with brief illustrations of the specific trajectories of Africa and some African countries within that framework. Finally, it shows how a number of issues are explored in the case studies presented, including how current changes might affect the future prospects of smallholder ('peasant') production of tropical export crops.     

《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。     

Calculating Trade Damages in the Context of the World Trade Organization's Dispute Settlement Process

Since its inception in 1995, the World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement system has received over 250 notifications of trade disputes. While most have been settled, in a few cases the WTO arbitrators had to approve damage awards. This paper will use one of these cases ( Hormones ) to explain the methodology arbitrators use to calculate damages and how this methodology differs from an efficiency-based measure of welfare that economists would instinctively provide. Yet, there are rational reasons for this difference and the arbitrator's methodology does a better job of providing incentives for countries not to violate trade agreements.     

Potential Impacts of Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP) on the Fresh Vegetable and Beef Trade

ABSTRACT

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP) negotiations influence the global economic position of both the European Union (EU) and the United States (U.S.). Agricultural issues are an important part of the negotiation. There have been several analyses of the aggregate impacts of a T-TIP agreement. This report analyzes the commodity impacts on trade for fresh vegetables and beef. Vegetables represent the situation where the U.S. is a growing net importer and the EU has substantial potential for expanding exports to the U.S. in this highly competitive marketplace. Beef represents the situation where sanitary and phytosanitary restrictions on hormone use in production have prohibited consumer choices from being revealed in the marketplace for both the EU and the U.S. The authors provide insight into where the comparative advantages lie in freer trade situations.     

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     

The integration of energy and agricultural markets

This article addresses the evolving links between energy and agricultural markets. Prior to 2005, there was little correlation between energy and agricultural commodity prices. In 2006–2008, with the ethanol boom in the United States, there emerged a strong link between crude oil, gasoline, and corn prices. There was little link between ethanol and corn. However, in late 2008 and 2009, the markets changed as ethanol production came under severe economic pressure and 2 billion out of 12 billion gallons of capacity shut down. During this period ethanol became priced more on corn, as the breakeven corn price helped drive the ethanol market. This article explores the drivers in these markets as well as other major issues facing the corn ethanol industry in the United States such as the blend wall. The article concludes with a review of prospects of a future cellulosic biofuels industry.