The ‘Real’ Impact of GATT/WTO – a Generalised Approach

Rose’s result in 2004 that GATT/WTO has no significant impact on bilateral trade triggered off a series of empirical studies. Each of those studies augments Rose’s paper in one specific methodological aspect with the general finding that GATT/WTO significantly fosters members’ trade, although the estimated impact varies between 2 per cent and 195 per cent of trade creation. We combine the methodological contributions of previous studies to overcome these isolated approaches, to account for possible interactions and to develop a more general view on the impact of GATT/WTO. In particular, we find that GATT/WTO promotes members’ trade by around 86 per cent.     

Globalization and the ‘confidence game’

We show that governments in developing countries have an incentive to play the “confidence game” — wherein the need to win the confidence of the international capital market ‘can actually prevent a country from following otherwise sensible policies and force it to follow policies that it would normally consider perverse’. This incentive arises because of a combination of a ‘conformity bias’ and ‘good news bias’ in governmental decision making in an open economy, which results in inefficient outcomes which increases rather than decreases the threat of devaluation. While institutions that encourage greater transparency and the public revelation of information, may often mitigate this inefficiency, on some occasions increased transparency may even exacerbate the inefficiency.     

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.     

ON PASLNETTI'S ‘G’ MATRIX

Pasinetti's vertically integrated H matrix has been much used in economic theory but his other vertically integrated matrix, G — which is of a quite different nature — has been little noticed. This paper considers the nature of the G matrix, its relationship to H, and varous issues — concerning consumption and growth, value added, sales revenue and differential growth or profit rates — for the analysis of which G is a very useful analytical tool.     

Consumer attitudes to ‘Healthy’ restaurants

This paper describes the results of a qualitative research study that sought the views of consumers about using restaurants as a setting for health promotion and, specifically, for providing low-fat healthy food choices. As health promotion has evolved from a major focus on individual change toward a greater focus on the environments in which people live, work and recreate, restaurants in Australia are now being targeted as appropriate organizations for change. Consumers in this study expressed cautious interest in the idea. However, it was clear that their prime motivation for choosing a restaurant and a restaurant meal did not lie with healthy food considerations. Instead, issues such as cost, personal preference and hygiene appeared to be more important.     

Joint Production with ‘Restricted Free Disposal’

A single production system with constant returns can produce any level and composition of demand by appropriate intensities of the cost‐minimizing processes. Hence, in the long run, products can never be in excess supply and there exists a system of prices of production which is semipositive and independent of demand. These (and other) properties do not, in general, carry over to joint production systems where one or several processes produce two or more different products. The proportions in which products emerge will generally be different from those in which they are required for use. The usual approach to that problem is to apply the rule of ‘free goods’. This assumption may be applied to goods which, if they are left where they are and as they are, cause neither costs nor benefits. But it cannot be applied to outworn machines, scrap, wastes or pollutants and is therefore not generally applicable. The present paper aims at finding conditions for the existence of cost‐minimizing systems for cases where this crucial assumption either is completely absent or is substituted by the assumption of ‘restricted free disposal’, i.e. by the assumption that excess production is permitted up to a certain tolerated limit. It will be proved that the conditions for the existence of cost‐minimizing systems with free disposal carry over to systems with restricted free disposal.     

Repeated games and the ‘reciprocal dumping’ model of trade

A repeated game version of the basic Brander and Krugman (1983) model is analyzed. In the Brander-Krugman model, rivalry among oligopolistic firms gives rise to international trade. It is now shown that no trade, which is welfare-reducing when transportation costs are negligible, is a strong Nash equilibrium of the supergame. The threat strategies that support ‘no trade’, the discount rate, and the crucial role of transportation costs are discussed, extending the BranderKrugman analysis in a natural way.     

Assessing the Performance of ‘Inflation Targeting Lite’ Countries

This paper deals with what is referred to in the literature as the ‘Inflation Targeting Lite’ (ITL) countries. These are a category of emerging countries, whose main characteristics are that they are least developed and small economies that pursue IT. They use inflation targeting to define their monetary policy framework, but for a number of reasons they are not in a position to put top priority to IT in relation to other objectives. This paper deals with a set of ITL countries for which consistent data could be gathered, and for which a date for setting inflation targeting could be discerned. The object of the paper is to study the impact of IT on actual inflation and inflation expectations. We utilise intervention analysis to time series on inflation for a number of ITL countries, which have actually implemented IT. In doing so our main concern is to assess whether, due to the IT intervention, there has been a significant change in the trend corresponding to these series and the extent to which inflation rates have actually been ‘locked‐in’ at low levels after the implementation of IT. Two major results emerge. The first is that ITL countries have been successful in ‘locking‐in’ inflation rates. The second is that non‐IT countries have also been successful in terms of the ‘lock‐in’ effect. Our overall conclusion, then, is that other factors in addition to IT underpin the apparent success of the control of inflation.     

‘It’s the identification,stupid’: profiling senior public service managers for training and development

A review of practices of senior management development across the upper echelons of the public services of major jurisdictions shows that while the need to develop leaders is universally recognised by governments, there are still considerable gaps in the development function. One of the key gaps the article argues that is central to the training and development function is that of identification and targeting of individuals. A profiling protocol is presented that is argued could be an appropriate tool for governments to consider as they seek to link the desired competencies with the career aspirations of their public service senior managers.     

An evolving historical paradigm: from ‘home economics' to ‘family and consumer sciences’1

With the professional name change in the United States of ‘home economics' to ‘family and consumer sciences’, the purpose of this paper is to facilitate communicating an understanding of our profession to our students. This paper focuses on an historical perspective depicting a progression of conceptualizations about the profession. Four developmental models are presented to provide a system of organization that will help students develop their professional identity. This paper is a reflection of an individual journey to gain a personal-professional identity. The sharing of this pilgrimage and the visual models that have been developed to enhance its communication have become a valuable resource and meaningful part of an undergraduate core class that provides students with the initiative to begin their own professional clarifications.