This paper has two purposes. It first considers the impact on world food prices of the changes in restrictions on trade in staple foods during the 2008 world food price crisis. Those changes—reductions in import protection or increases in export restraints—were meant to partially insulate...

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...

Notwithstanding the tariffication component of the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture, import tariffs on farm products continue to provide an incomplete indication of the extent to which agricultural producer and consumer incentives are distorted in national markets. As well, in developing...

Most of the large tariff reductions achieved in multilateral trade negotiations have involved tariff-cutting formulas such as the ‘Swiss’ formula. Wide variations in initial tariff rates between active participants, however, call for new approaches under the Doha Development Agenda. This...

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...

Protection unconstrained by rules typically varies considerably over time. The policy disciplines introduced in the Uruguay Round in `new' areas such as agricultural, services, and developing country industrial protection will constrain, but not eliminate, this variability. The effects of these...

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...

The claim by global trade modelers that the potential contribution to global economic welfare of removing agricultural subsidies is less than one-tenth of that from removing agricultural tariffs puzzles many observers. To help explain that result, this paper first compares the OECD and...

This paper examines whether, in the presence of trade preferences, Sub-Saharan African economies, and especially its poorest households, could gain from multilateral trade reform. The World Bank’s LINKAGE model of the global economy is employed to examine the impact first of current trade...