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 shows that research on international agricultural trade reform can make much greater contributions to understanding than was feasible in earlier trade negotiations. Part of this is due to improvements in the basic data on production, consumption and trade associated with the...

Trade policy reforms in recent decades have sharply reduced the distortions that wereharming agriculture in developing countries, yet global trade in farm products continues to befar more distorted than trade in nonfarm goods. Those distortions reduce some forms ofpoverty and inequality but...

The WTO agricultural negotiations of the Doha round are a key issue in the public debate. This paper analyses the effects of different options to improve market-access on the basis of a GTAP model, comparing the impact of the Harbinson proposal and the Swiss formula on trade balances. An...

Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models are increasingly used for global trade policy analyses. This thesis addresses three issues that have arisen in this context. The first is the question of model validation: Do these models capture the kind of behavior actually observed in markets? The...

The poverty effects and in particular the impact of trade liberalization on smallholder livestock producers in African and South East Asian developing countries (Malawi, Zambia, Uganda, Mozambique, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Philippines) is addressed by disaggregating income sources...

Trade policy reform prospects have generated debate about the impacts on poverty. Some critics assert that price changes induced by trade reform are minimal and may not be distinguishable from price fluctuations induced by other shocks to the global economy. This paper addresses this issue by...

This paper presents a validation experiment of a global CGE trade model widely used for analysis of trade liberalization. We focus on the ability of the model to reproduce price volatility in wheat markets. The literature on model validation is reviewed with an eye towards designing an...

With the advent of the WTO’s Doha Development Agenda, as well as the MillenniumDevelopment Goals aiming to reduce poverty by 50 percent by 2015, poverty impacts oftrade reforms have attracted increasing attention. This has been particularly true ofagricultural trade reform due to the...

The Special Safeguard Mechanism (SSM) was a key issue in the July 2008 failure to reach agreement in the WTO negotiations under the Doha Development Agenda. It includes both price (P-SSM) and quantity-triggered measures (Q-SSM). This paper uses a stochastic simulation model of the world wheat...