Tunisia showed strong economic performance, low inflation, and reduced poverty owing to its sound and transparent macroeconomic policies, trade liberalization, and social policies. Executive Directors commended this development, and stressed the need to tighten monetary and fiscal policies, and...

This paper provides quantitative estimates of the impact of removing agricultural support (both tariffs and subsidies) in partial- and general-equilibrium frameworks. The results show that agricultural support in industrial countries is highly distortionary and tariffs have a larger...

This paper elaborates on a number of key principles that need to underpin a coherent and development-friendly architecture for the WTO. The key principles include enlarging the scope of WTO bargaining to include labor flows as well as capital flows; creating a structure that would provide a...

Iraq faces structural reforms designed to effect transition from opaque administrative structures to competitive markets. The process has already begun with a series of measures announced by the Coalition Provisional Authority for Iraq. The paper provides arguments in favor of establishing...

This paper estimates a gravity model to address the issue of whether intra-Arab trade is too little. Although gravity models have been extensively used to measure bilateral trade among countries, they have—to the best of our knowledge—never been used to measure intra-Arab trade. Our results...

It often appears self-evident that regional integration arrangements (RIAs) result in more far-reaching liberalization of intra-bloc trade than is possible if countries restrict themselves to a multilateral approach. This paper considers whether such arrangements do in fact imply, or facilitate,...

With the Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations moribund, it is time to reconsider the future of trade negotiations as an impetus for reform. Services trade is a leading-edge behind-the-border issue, so a services perspective offers critical insights into the future of trade negotiations...