East Asia has rapidly become the third centre of gravity for global economic activity. North America is relatively well integrated with East Asia, but Europe is not. This paper explores the extent to which economic growth and trade poli - cy developments over the next decade will strengthen...

The Free Trade Area of the Americas FTAA will increase import competition for some forest product industries in Alabama but create export opportunities for others. Forest products loom large in the Alabama economy, both in terms of income and pollution. The present paper gauges the potential...

The issue of liberalization of international trade in services has received considerable attention in recent years. One of the benefits discussed in the literature is the role of services in facilitating goods trade among countries. We test this claim by analyzing the impact of trade in services...

With the help of a simple model of production and trade, we examine the differential impact of tariff escalation on skilled and unskilled wages in an economy. Our findings provide a lobbying-based explanation of the prevalence of tariff escalation in developed countries. It also predicts the...

From 2004, enlargement of the European Union is expected to bring substantial net economic benefits. Herein lies a weakness, in that practically all empirical studies characterise ‘single market’ accession using simple ad hoc uniform percentage reductions in trade costs. Employing a modified...

The economic welfare implications of some countries using new genetically modified varieties in crop production will depend on which countries choose to adopt them and on whether others (notably Western Europe) ban their importation. They also depend on existing (non-GMO-specific) agricultural...

The first generation of genetically modified (GM) crop varieties sought to increase farmer profitability through cost reductions or higher yields. The next generation of GM food research is focusing also on breeding for attributes of interest to consumers, beginning with ‘golden rice’, which...

When impacts of WTO market access proposals are analyzed with economic trade models, it is necessary to aggregate tariff data from the detailed tariff line level to the model level. In this article import tariffs and implemented import tariff cuts are aggregated from the HS6-digit tariff line...

The global coffee market is characterised by repeated long term price declines interspersed with positive spikes. Numerous solutions to the coffee price instability have been suggested. Ultimately, diversification away from coffee production is likely to be necessary, but some form of supply...

We used the GTAP-W model - GTAP version 5 with water resources added - to estimate the impact of hypothetical Doha-like liberalization of agricultural trade on water use. Three conclusions emerge. First, the change in regional water use is less than 10 per cent relative to the baseline in 2010,...