Multilateral,Regional and Bilateral Trade‐Policy Options for the United States and Japan

We have used the Michigan Model of World Production and Trade to simulate the economic effects on the United States, Japan, and other major trading countries/regions of the Doha Round of WTO multilateral trade negotiations and a variety of regional/bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) involving the United States and Japan. We estimate that an assumed reduction of post‐Uruguay Round tariffs and other barriers on agricultural and industrial products and services by 33 per cent in the Doha Round would increase world welfare by $686.4 billion, with gains of $164.0 billion for the United States, $132.6 billion for Japan, and significant gains for all other industrialised and developing countries/regions. If there were global free trade with all post‐Uruguay Round trade barriers completely removed, world welfare would increase by $2.1 trillion, with gains of $497.0 billion (5.5 per cent of GNP) for the United States and $401.9 billion (6.2 per cent of GNP) for Japan. Regional agreements such as an APEC FTA, an ASEAN Plus 3 FTA, and a Western Hemisphere FTA would increase global and member country welfare but much less so than the Doha multilateral trade round would. Separate bilateral FTAs involving Japan with Singapore, Mexico, Chile and Korea, and the United States with Chile, Singapore and Korea would have positive, though generally small, welfare effects on the partner countries, but potentially disruptive sectoral employment shifts in some countries. There would be trade diversion and detrimental welfare effects on some non‐member countries for both the regional and bilateral FTAs analysed. The welfare gains from multilateral trade liberalisation are therefore considerably greater than the gains from preferential trading arrangements and more uniformly positive for all countries.     

Regionalisation of Trade and Regionalism in Trade Policy – Patterns, Strategies and Impact

Against the backdrop of the stalled Doha Round the emphasis in the trade policies of nations and country groupings is widely expected to shift further away from multilateral trade negotiations and towards the conclusion of preferential trade agreements (PTAs). This article sketches the network of international trade flows and shows how it has increasingly been matched by a worldwide web of PTAs, the nature of which has changed over time. PTAs are discussed in their regional context and assessed with a view to their economic impact and their implications for the multilateral trading system.     

Computational Analysis of the Menu of US‐Japan Trade Policies

We have used the Michigan Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) Model of World Production and Trade to calculate the aggregate welfare and sectoral employment effects of the menu of US‐Japan trade policies. The menu of policies encompasses the various preferential US and Japan bilateral and regional free trade agreements (FTAs) negotiated and in process, unilateral removal of existing trade barriers and global (multilateral) free trade. The welfare impacts of the FTAs on the United States and Japan are shown to be rather small in absolute and relative terms. The sectoral employment effects are also generally small but vary across the individual sectors depending on the patterns of the bilateral liberalisation. The welfare effects on the FTA partner countries are mostly positive though generally small, but there are some indications of potentially disruptive employment shifts in some partner countries. There are indications of trade diversion and detrimental welfare effects on non‐member countries for some of the FTAs analysed. In comparison to the welfare gains from the US and Japan bilateral FTAs, the gains from both unilateral trade liberalisation by the United States, Japan and the FTA partners, and from global (multilateral) free trade are shown to be rather substantial and more uniformly positive for all countries in the global trading system. The US and Japan FTAs are based on ‘hub’ and ‘spoke’ arrangements. We show that the spokes emanate out in different and often overlapping directions, suggesting that the complex of bilateral FTAs may create distortions of the global trading system.     

The DOHA Round of Multilateral Negotiations and the Embellishing Role of the Developing Economies

Despite unanswered questions about causality, trade expansion is associated with rapid real GDP growth in the developing economies. While the WTO's mandate is to liberalize multilateral trade and support its rule-based conduct, its operations have definite development relevance. After a history of non-participation in the multilateral trading system, the developing economies began to participate in it in almost an explosive manner. Several developing economies have not only emerged as important traders since the mid-1980s but as G-21 they have also made their presence felt in the on-going multilateral trade negotiations. They made decisive contributions to the July Framework Agreement of 2004. The role of the developing economies in the Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations has gone on steadily growing. It has been christened the Development Round. It deals with several areas of special interests to the developing economies—agriculture, non-agricultural market access and services being some of the more important ones—and eventually hopes to correct the imbalances in the multilateral trade regime. A successful Doha Round would indeed contribute favorably to growth, have a discernable favorable impact over the incidence of poverty and help in achieving the first MDG.     

The WTO,the Doha Round Impasse,PTAs, and FTAs/RTAs

Beginning in 2001, the Doha Rounds afforded World Trade Organization (WTO) members the opportunity to develop equitable trade rules between the developed and developing member states. The WTO has been successful in advancing multilateral international trade; however, since the Doha Rounds stalemate, it has witnessed the development of more than 300 Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) and over 500 Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). This article attempts to answer two questions: (1) has the failure of the Doha Rounds contributed to the proliferation of PTAs and FTAs, and (2) are these agreements threatening the regulatory authority of the WTO, which, in turn, reduces its ability to effectively promote and govern free trade, and its mission?     

世界贸易组织多哈回合谈判受挫原因及启示

文章指出,世界贸易组织最主要的职能是组织和推动多边贸易谈判,多哈回合是世界贸易组织成立以来的第一轮多边贸易谈判,自启动至今屡遭挫折,其主要原因是:区域经济一体化组织深入发展,世界经济力量对比发生了变化;谈判领域和内容越来越敏感,改革接近零和博弈;谈判中发展中成员联合程度提高,影响力扩大;世界贸易组织自身决策机制等存在缺陷。文章提出,为促进世界贸易自由化发展,世界贸易组织应加快改革进程,慎重增加谈判议题,扩大管辖范围;切实做好现有规则和协议的执行与落实;改革决策机制,提高解决现实问题的效率;平衡各方利益,进一步增强世界贸易组织的民主性和公平性,以继续发挥自由贸易主导者和推动者的作用。     

Trade Policies in Southeast Asia in the Wider Asian Perspective

This paper takes stock of trade policies in Southeast Asia after the Asian crisis and in the wake of the current global economic crisis. It compares trade policies in individual Southeast Asian countries; places them in the context of regional and global economic integration; and particularly draws implications for the region from the rise of China and India. The first section looks at recent trade and FDI patterns in Southeast Asia. Then follows an overview of key trade‐policy trends, in the region overall and in individual countries. The next sections examine ASEAN countries in international trade negotiations and agreements: first in the WTO, especially in the Doha Round; then within ASEAN; and finally on cross‐regional FTAs. The paper concludes that ASEAN countries cannot rely on external tracks ‘from above’ for meaningful trade policy reform. Since the Asian crisis there has been a slowdown of reform momentum, and too much reliance on trade negotiations – especially FTAs. Rather, countries in the region have to rely on themselves –‘from below’ as it were. The engine of liberalisation and regulatory reform has to be home‐driven – as it was before the Asian crisis – with governments taking unilateral measures in response to internal and external conditions.     

Trade Liberalisation: The Effects of Free Trade Agreements on the Competitiveness of the Dairy Sector

In recent years, preferential trade agreements (PTAs), free trade agreements (FTAs) in particular, have proliferated while WTO negotiations have stagnated. This paper contributes to the literature on trade liberalisation and the agricultural sector by analysing the effects of FTAs on the competitiveness of the dairy sector across 76 countries and over a 20‐year period from 1990 to 2009. With a longitudinal econometric model, the results demonstrate that when a country has a revealed comparative advantage in the dairy sector, FTAs positively influence several indicators of competitiveness in the dairy sector, such as production, market share and trade balance. The results also indicate that multilateral FTAs are more beneficial than bilateral FTAs. There is strong empirical evidence that FTAs are more beneficial to developed countries than to developing countries. There is no statistical evidence to support the hypothesis about a relationship between FTAs and farm‐gate price.     

Failure of the WTO Ministerial Conference at Cancun: Reasons and Remedies

This paper first discusses four general developments in the world trading system that have made it increasingly difficult in recent years for nations to reach multilateral agreements aimed at further liberalising international trade, namely: (1) the increased technical complexity and disruptive domestic economic effects of the issues being negotiated; (2) the shift in relative bargaining power among the negotiating participants in favour of the developing countries; (3) the proliferation of bilateral and regional free trade agreements in contrast to multilateral agreements, and (4) the increased emphasis on achieving ‘fairness’ rather than reciprocity in trade liberalisation. Differences in negotiating positions of the participants on the major specific negotiating subjects of the Doha Round, such as new rules covering investment, competition policy, government procurement policy, and trade facilitation, agricultural liberalisation, changes in anti‐dumping and countervailing duty rules, the tariff‐cutting rule to increase access to non‐agricultural markets, and further liberalisation in the services sector, are then considered as well as the likelihood of reaching compromises on these matters. Finally, the possibilities of reaching acceptable balances of concessions and gains are considered for such key participants as the Group of 20 developing countries, the European Union, the United States and other industrial countries.     

Global Market Integration and National Sovereignty

In this paper, we first trace the evolution of the global trading system from the nineteenth century to the present‐day GATT/WTO arrangements, calling attention to the key roles of reciprocity and non‐discrimination, and we note how the system is now challenged by the new paradigm of global market integration. We then consider the recent plethora of free trade agreements (FTAs), including those between industrial and developing countries, and their uneasy relationship with a multilateral system based on non‐discrimination. Thereafter, we seek to identify the boundaries of the WTO and examine how the potential expansion of these boundaries may result in the over‐extension and weakening of the effectiveness and influence of the WTO.     

Bilateral ‘WTO‐Plus’ Free Trade Agreements: The WTO Trade Policy Review of Singapore 2004

The World Trade Organisation's 2004 Trade Policy Review of Singapore (WTO‐TPR Singapore 2004) depicts the small and outward‐oriented economy as one of the most open countries to international trade and investment. The review highlights the benefits of the outward‐oriented strategy that has enabled the Singapore economy to weather recent external shocks such as the Asian financial crisis to the SARS and to the recent unfavourable conditions in the Middle East. In particular, the report commended Singapore's efforts on its liberalisation of the services sector and its economic benefits to consumers and global trade. However, the WTO‐TPR Singapore 2004 highlights several key areas of concerns: (a) the commitment to multilateral agreements with the rising number of bilateral free trade agreements signed by Singapore and (b) the lack of growth of total factor productivity, a key indicator for long‐run efficiency of the economy. The paper addresses the above key concerns raised in the WTO's TPR of Singapore in terms of its commitment to global trade in terms of WTO‐plus bilateral FTAs, which intends to support a multilateral trading system, and its overall industrial strategies to raise its competitiveness.     

The Dispute Settlement Mechanism of the WTO: A Brief History and an Evaluation from Economic,Contractarian and Legal Perspectives

Any rule‐based system has to include a mechanism for the enforcement of its rules and a means for settlement of disputes about alleged violation of rules. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), concluded in 1947, and its successor the World Trade Organisation (WTO) that subsumed it in 1995, embody rules governing the global trading system as specified in various agreements that their members have entered into over time. Naturally, both had a dispute settlement mechanism (DSM). It was a primarily political one in the GATT and was transformed into a largely legalistic one in the multilateral agreement that established the WTO. This paper reviews the history and evaluation of the two DSMs and examines their efficiency based on appropriate criteria. It views them from three alternative and overlapping perspectives: political‐diplomatic, legal‐economic and social. It concludes with a discussion of the unresolved problems in the operation of the WTO's DSM and the prospects of resolving them in the ongoing Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations.     

Regionalism Within Multilateralism: The WTO Trade Policy Review of Canada

The World Trade Organisation published a Trade Policy Review of Canada in 2003. In this paper, we discuss the WTO Review and augment the discussion by presenting original data and reviewing the empirical literature. The WTO concludes that Canada's trade regime is open and transparent but maintains barriers in a few important sectors. We subject this claim to empirical scrutiny, comparing Canada's actual imports to a multilateral benchmark based on the gravity equation. We show that Canada imports about what should be expected given the size of its economy and its location. In a second benchmarking exercise, we show that Canada's anti‐dumping initiations are in proportion to its imports and that Canada's exports are targeted less by other countries’ anti‐dumping investigations than what might be expected based on Canadian export levels. Like many other countries, Canada has pursued trade liberalisation through the World Trade Organisation while simultaneously signing multiple regional trade agreements. Our summary of the recent literature indicates that Canada's regional trade agreements have generated more trade creation than trade diversion. Canada has also spurred imports from the least developed countries by unilaterally eliminating tariffs and quota barriers on 48 of the world's poorest countries in January 2003. We also discuss Canadian progress in opening its agriculture and clothing industries. Overall, we conclude that Canada appears committed to advancing globalisation through multilateral trade liberalisation supplemented by unilateral and bilateral initiatives.     

Free Trade Agreements and Governance of the Global Trading System

This article explores how far free trade agreements (FTAs) have strengthened or weakened global governance of the trading system. We open with an analysis of the altered political and economic context within which countries have come, in recent years, to assign a new importance to regional and bilateral trade agreements in their trade policies. We then consider each of the main provisions included in FTAs and comment on how these may separately affect the management of trade relations. We conclude with some observations of the broader trends affecting global governance that are associated with the spread of trade agreements as a whole.     

Competing Regionalism – Patterns,Economic Impact and Implications for the Multilateral Trading System

The stagnation of the Doha Round trade talks has given a fresh impetus to regionalism worldwide which manifests itself in a race for markets between regional trading blocs. This Forum is concerned with the patterns of regionalism to be found in different parts of the world, with their interplay and the implications for the multilateral trading system.     

Dispensing with NAFTA Rules of Origin? Some Policy Options

The objective of this paper is to use a computable general equilibrium (CGE) methodology to estimate the economic gains, for both Canada and Mexico, of: (1) adopting a North American customs union (CU) that would also liberalise rules of origin (ROO); and (2) reviving the WTO scenario of multilateral free trade, thereby eliminating preferential commerce and thus the need for preferential ROO across free trade agreements (FTAs). Such a CGE methodology is useful as the approach permits computation of an efficiency (or ex post) cost of ROO that might, in some contexts, be more relevant than the existing ex ante indices of ROO restrictiveness, which are unable to account for the fact that the use of preferential access in an FTA (and the concomitant ROO compliance) is an option, not an obligation. The paper shows that the erosion of NAFTA tariff preferences at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s, which resulted from a different phasing of the NAFTA and Uruguay Round measures, has reduced the efficiency cost of NAFTA ROO, making these rules economically less relevant, especially for Canada, and therefore limiting somewhat the gains from liberalising them through a CU. Given this, the WTO scenario of multilateral free trade remains the approach that would deliver the largest economic gains in terms of GDP and welfare, while making preferential commerce and ROO obsolete.     

Economic Partnership Agreements Between Sub‐Saharan Africa and the EU: A Development Perspective

This paper draws on Hinkle and Schiff (2003). It analyses the planned Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) between the EU and Sub‐Saharan Africa (SSA) from a development perspective. It does not take a position on whether SSA should enter into EPAs with the EU. Rather, it starts from the notion that the process of forming EPAs is unlikely to be reversed and examines the conditions that will maximise SSA's benefits from the EPAs. If this notion is correct, then the analysis presented in the paper applies. On the other hand, Pascal Lamy, the EU Trade Commissioner, made a proposal at the May 2004 G‐90 summit in Dakar that might lead to a change in the EPA process. He proposed that the G‐90, a group consisting of ACP and non‐ACP LDC countries, should not have to make concessions at the WTO Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations, i.e., he proposed a ‘free round’ for the G‐90. This proposal opens the door to the possibility that the same might apply to the ACP countries in the EU‐ACP negotiations and that the EPA process might be reversed. The paper considers the key issues raised by the planned EPAs, their relationship to the WTO's Doha Round and the EU's Everything‐but‐Arms Initiative, the changes needed to make the EPAs internally consistent, the domestic reforms in SSA that would need to accompany trade liberalisation in both goods and services, and the potential effects of the EPAs on regional integration in SSA. The EPAs will pose a number of policy challenges for SSA countries, including: restructuring of indirect tax systems, reduction of MFN tariffs, liberalisation of service imports on an MFN basis and related regulatory reforms in the services sector, and liberalisation of trade in both goods and services within the regional trading blocs in SSA. The paper also finds that the EPAs provide an opportunity to accelerate regional and global trade integration in SSA. To realise the potential development benefits of the planned EPAs, two steps are essential. First, the EU must, as it has stated, truly treat the EPAs as instruments of development, subordinating its commercial interests in the agreements to the development needs of SSA. Second, the SSA countries need to implement a number of EPA‐related trade policy reforms. However, the latter is far from certain, given the lack of reform momentum in SSA.     

Mini‐symposium on the WTO Non‐agricultural Market Access (NAMA) Negotiations

NAMA liberalisation alone will not be sufficient to achieve the development goals of the Doha Round. The structure of developing countries’ economies and weaknesses in their infrastructure and institutions mean that adjustment to liberalisation is often costly and export responses slow. To make NAMA work, developing countries will need technical and financial support to raise their ability to adapt to greater openness and globalisation pressures and to increase their export capabilities. Although developing countries should decide how to raise their ability to adjust and to increase exports, bilateral donors and multilateral agencies will need to fund NAMA support programmes. The WTO, however, is not the appropriate or competent international agency to provide or disburse such funding. It can provide technical advice and offers a negotiating vehicle for industrial countries to signal that the development aims of the Doha Round are recognised in substantive terms. If industrial countries support developing countries’ NAMA‐related adjustment costs in addition to offering NAMA tariff cuts, the chances of a successful Doha agreement and genuine pro‐development outcomes will be boosted significantly.     

Multilateral Agricultural Trade Liberalisation: The Contrasting Fortunes of Developing Countries in the Doha Round

An applied general equilibrium model is used to assess the impact of multilateral trade liberalisation in agriculture, with particular emphasis on developing countries. We use original data, and the model includes some specific features such as a dual labour market. Applied tariffs, including those under preferential regimes and regional agreements, are taken into account at the detailed product level, together with the corresponding bound tariffs on which countries negotiate. The various types of farm support are detailed, and several groups of developing countries are distinguished. Simulations give a contrasted picture of the benefits developing countries would draw from the Doha development round. The results suggest that previous studies have neglected preferential agreements and the binding overhang (in tariffs as well as domestic support), and have treated developing countries with a high level of aggregation and been excessively optimistic about the actual benefits of multilateral trade liberalisation. Regions like sub‐Saharan Africa are more likely to suffer from the erosion of existing preferences. The main gainers of the Doha Round are likely to be developed countries and Cairns Group members.     

Trade Policy and the Obama Administration

During his primary campaign, President Obama took an aggressive stance on trade, suggesting a protectionist drift in U.S. trade policy. However, it seems more likely that policy will focus more on enforcement of existing rights than on protectionist initiatives. The major influences on trade policy are likely to be multilateral approaches to trade problems, broad foreign policy concerns, the impact of trade policy on recovery from the current recession, and global climate change initiatives. Holdover initiatives on the World Trade Organization's Doha round and bilateral agreements will be joined by global climate change as the principal policy issues for the next few years.