Developing Countries and a New Round of WTO Negotiations

This article summarizes some of the results and findings emergingfrom an ongoing World Bank research and capacity-building projectthat focuses on the World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiatingagenda from a developing country perspective. Recent researchsuggests that the potential gains from further multilateralliberalization of trade remain very large. The payoffs associatedwith attempts to introduce substantive disciplines in the WTOon domestic regulatory regimes are much less certain. This suggeststhat the focus of current and future negotiations should beprimarily on the bread and butter of the multilateral tradingsystem—the progressive liberalization of barriers to tradein goods and services on a nondiscriminatory basis. In addition,priority should be given to ensuring that rules are consistentwith the development needs of poorer countries and to helpingdeveloping countries implement WTO obligations.      

Productivity growth and convergence in crop, ruminant, and nonruminant production: measurement and forecasts

Projections of future productivity growth rates in agriculture are an essential input for a great variety of tasks, ranging from development of an outlook for global commodity markets to the analysis of interactions between land use, deforestation, and ecological diversity. Yet solid projections for these variables have proven elusive—particularly on a global basis. This is due, in no small part, to the difficulty of measuring historical total factor productivity growth. Consequently, most productivity projections are based on partial factor productivity measures that can be quite misleading. The purpose of this work is to provide worldwide forecasts of agricultural productivity growth till the year 2040 based on the latest time series evidence on total factor productivity growth for crops, ruminants, and nonruminant livestock. The results suggest that most regions in the sample are likely to experience larger productivity gains in livestock than in crops. Within livestock, the nonruminant sector is expected to continue to be more dynamic than the ruminant sector. Given the rapid rates of productivity growth observed recently, nonruminant and crop productivity in developing countries may be converging to the productivity levels of developed countries. For ruminants, the results show that productivity levels in developing countries are likely to be diverging from those in developed countries.     

FACTOR MARKET INCIDENCE OF AGRICULTURAL TRADE LIBERALIZATION: SOME ADDITIONAL RESULTS

Liberalization of trade implies changes in producer prices, which has consequences for farm income, agricultural employment and asset values. The relative incidence of the effect of changes in prices on fixed factors depends on the rclative magnitude of the Morishima elasticities of substitution in agricultural production.