Does trade policy influence schooling and child labor decisions in low income countries? We examine this question in the context of India's 1991 tariff reforms. Overall, in the 1990s, rural India experienced a dramatic increase in schooling and decline in child labor. These trends were...

Labor market consequences are at the forefront of most debates on the merits of trade liberalization. Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have become the primary form of trade liberalization in most countries, and several studies have shown that discriminatory and non-discriminatory trade...

Trade liberalization is often met with sharp opposition. Recent examples include the so-called ‘Bolkestein’ directive, which allows service providers from a given EU member to temporarily work in another member country. One way to view such a reform is that it simply widens the range of...

This Paper is concerned with the interaction of regulated efficiency and World Trade Organization (WTO) accession and its impact on China’s motor vehicle sector. The analysis is conducted using a 23-sector/25-region computable general equilibrium model. Regulatory reform and internal...

Rapid industrialization in East Asia, particularly China, is raising questions about who will feed the region in the next century and how Asia will pay for its food imports. The paper addresses this question by first reviewing existing food sector projections and then taking an economy-wide...

This paper addresses three questions relating to the very extensive use of the GTAP global trade protection database: Are there additional price-distorting policy instruments worthy of inclusion in the base year? What is the appropriate counterfactual set of price distortions in the year of...

We review a recent body of theoretical work that aims to put numbers on the consequences of globalization. A unifying theme of our survey is methodological. We rely on gravity models and demonstrate how they can be used for counterfactual analysis. We highlight how various economic...

Rapid economic growth in some emerging economies in recent decades has significantly increased their global economic importance. If this rapid growth continues and is strongest in resource-poor Asian economies, the growth in global demand for imports of primary products also will continue, to...

This paper examines the impacts of key trade reforms likely to affect the APEC region over the next decade. It does so by taking an economy-wide perspective using projections to the year 2005, based on the global CGE model known as GTAP. The paper begins by showing that the empirical impact of...

Protection unconstrained by rules often varies substantially over time. Rules-based disciplines, such as WTO tariff bindings and bindings on market access in services, constrain this variability. We examine the theoretical effects of such constraints on the expected cost of protection and offer...