Indonesia has made a steady progress in implementing trade reforms in recent years and this has been one of several factors helping formal sector employment to expand reducing poverty levels and expanding the ranks of Indonesia’s middle class.
... 更多显示 In addition, Indonesia has been more fortunate than its neighbors in coming through global financial crisis relatively unscathed. Going forward, an aggressive push on trade reform designed to achieve higher growth will help to increase employment opportunities in higher-value industries, while also increasing international and domestic trade. A number of on-going efforts are designed to streamline and simplify trade-related procedures, but require a great effort to yield results.
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This paper assesses the impact of the rise of China on the trade of Latin American and Caribbean economies. The study proposes an index to measure the impact on trade, which suggests sizable effects, especially in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Honduras, Mexico, and Paraguay.
... 更多显示 The paper uses the index and a model of labor mobility, to calculate the impact of China's growth on labor markets in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. The resulting evidence suggests that the rise of China has had positive effects on agriculture and mining in Argentina and Brazil, which offset negative impacts on manufacturing industries, thus leaving total employment and real wages virtually unchanged in the long run. In contrast, the estimated impacts of China's rise on Mexico imply that the sizable shock to manufacturing was not offset by the positive shocks on mining and agriculture, reducing employment in the long run. The paper also discusses the effect of China on the degree of informality in these three economies and contrasts short-run and long-run effects on employment and wages across industries.
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This paper focuses on the sluggish growth of world trade relative to income growth in recent years. The analysis uses an empirical strategy based on an error correction model to assess whether the global trade slowdown is structural or cyclical.
... 更多显示 An estimate of the relationship between trade and income in the past four decades reveals that the long-term trade elasticity rose sharply in the 1990s, but declined significantly in the 2000s even before the global financial crisis. These results suggest that trade is growing slowly not only because of slow growth of gross domestic product, but also because of a structural change in the trade-gross domestic product relationship in recent years. The available evidence suggests that the explanation may lie in the slowing pace of international vertical specialization rather than increasing protection or the changing composition of trade and gross domestic product.
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This note analyzes the benefits of ECOWAS Common External Tariff (CET) and Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) will outweigh costs in Nigeria, but competitiveness is the real issue.
... 更多显示 After decade-long negotiations, the ECOWAS CET and EPA with the EU recently reached decisive milestones. These major reforms should have significant impacts and offer new opportunities to West Africa, but have so far failed to garner a broad consensus, notably in Nigeria. The lack of objective and easily accessible assessments of their likely effects appears to be partly responsible for this situation. Two recent World Bank studies use a simple methodology to assess the potential impact of these reforms on Nigeria. Overall, full implementation of the CET and EPA in Nigeria would result in limited fiscal losses, marginal welfare gains for consumers and higher profits for a majority of manufacturing firms accounting for the majority of jobs in this sector. Almost all firms experiencing negative effects exhibit higher-than-average profitability before the reforms and most would remain profitable after them. The predicted magnitude of both the CET and EPA is small compared to gains that could be achieved by tackling supply-side constraints faced by Nigerian firms. Combining trade policy reforms with an ambitious competitiveness agenda that addresses the most binding constraints and promotes regional trade appears as the best way to maximize the benefits and minimize the potential cost of these reforms.
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The South Asia Free Trade Area (SAFTA) came into effect in 2006, but free and unfettered trade is still a work in progress. Drawing from theory and evidence, this note looks at how all countries, especially the smaller ones, can gain from mutual trade liberalization.
... 更多显示 Consumers, exporters, and producers, the three key players in this debate, all stand to gain from multilateral trade. Consumers enjoy lower prices, more product variety, and better quality goods. Exporters obtain access to much larger markets and sourcing opportunities for key inputs. Producers are incentivized to become more efficient, increase their sizes and scales via access to a bigger market, gain cheaper and higher quality inputs, and receive more foreign direct investment (FDI). As an example of how smaller South Asian nations can reap significant benefits, the US-Mexican asymmetry case study is presented, demonstrating how Mexico rose to become the world's thirteenth largest economy after joining NAFTA. Given that the South Asia region is in the process of making SAFTA effective, nations that hold out from the process could suffer by being "innocent bystanders," which is a welfare loss faced by a country that does not fully participate in a regional agreement being created around it.
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This paper uses a global computable general-equilibrium framework with new detail on six Levant countries -- the Arab Republic of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, the Syrian Arab Republic, and Turkey -- to quantify the direct and indirect economic effects of the Syrian war and the advance of the Islamic State on the Levant.
... 更多显示 Syria and Iraq bear the brunt of the direct economic costs, while the other Levant countries lose in per capita but not in aggregate terms. The fact that the Islamic State's spread has undermined regional trade adds to varying degrees to the direct costs in all Levant economies and in the case of Syria and Iraq doubles the welfare losses. All these countries are foregoing opportunities to expand intra-Levant trade and the associated gains in economic efficiency and diversification. The average welfare effects are not indicative of within-country incidence, which varies among workers, landowners, and capitalists.
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Some of the headings included in this issue of the Development Economics Prospects Group (DECPG) daily economic news are as follows: financial markets; high income economies; and developing economies in Europe and Central Asia, and South Asia.
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Some of the headings included in this issue of the Development Economics Prospects Group (DECPG) daily economic news are as follows: financial markets; high income economies; and developing economies in Europe and Central Asia.
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This paper studies a simple, tractable model of labor adjustment in a trade model that allows researchers to analyze the economy's dynamic response to trade liberalization.
... 更多显示 Since it is a neoclassical market-clearing model, duality techniques can be employed to study the equilibrium and, despite its simplicity, a rich variety of properties emerge. The model generates gross flows of labor across industries, even in the steady state; persistent wage differentials across industries; gradual adjustment to a liberalization; and anticipatory adjustment to a pre-announced liberalization. Pre-announcement induces anticipatory flight from the liberalizing sector, driving up wages there temporarily and giving workers remaining there what this paper calls "anticipation rents." By this process, pre-announcement makes liberalization less attractive to export-sector workers and more attractive to import-sector workers, eventually making workers unanimous either in favor of or in opposition to liberalization. Based on these results, the paper identifies many pitfalls to conventional methods of empirical study of trade liberalization that are based on static models.
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This paper investigates gender differences in the impact of Brazil's trade liberalization on labor market outcomes. To identify the causal effect of trade reforms, the paper uses difference-in-difference estimation exploiting variation across microregions in pre-liberalization industry composition.
... 更多显示 The analysis finds that trade liberalization reduced male and female labor force participation and employment rates, but the effects on men were significantly larger. Thereby, tariff reductions contributed to gender convergence in labor force participation and employment rates. Gender differences are concentrated among the low-skilled population and in the tradable sector, where male and female workers are most likely to be imperfect substitutes.
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This is a statement by Mr. Roberto Azevedo, Director-General of the World Trade Organization (WTO) at the ninetieth meeting of the Development Committee held on October 11, 2014.
... 更多显示 He discusses that the imports of developing and emerging economies have been growing faster than developed countries. Although this pace has slowed recently, they are contributing significantly to the recovery of the global economy. There is a need to create the conditions for a new wave of trade expansion, to help deepen the integration of the developing world into the global economy. The Bali package agreed by WTO members last year delivered a great deal for developing countries. This included the trade facilitation agreement which is aimed at cutting the costs of trade and easing the flows of goods. He urges ministers to keep this issue high on their list of priorities for development assistance and to recognize the contribution that it can make in generating economic growth and development.
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On October 10, 2014, Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) Council of Governors adopted resolution number ninety six. It was resolved that, the Council of Governors of the Agency considers the Financial Statements, and the Report of Independent Accountants included in the 2014 annual report, as fulfilling the requirements of article 29 of the MIGA convention and of section 16(b) of the by-laws of the agency.
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In 1959, shortly after the European Economic Community was founded under the 1957 Treaty of Rome, Turkey applied for Associate Membership in the then six-member common market.
... 更多显示 By 1963, a path for integrating the economies of Turkey and the eventual European Union had been mapped. As with many trade agreements, agriculture posed difficult political hurdles, which were never fully cleared, even as trade barriers to other sectors were eventually removed and a Customs Union formed. This essay traces the influences the Turkey-European Union economic institutions have had on agricultural policies and the agriculture sector. An applied general equilibrium framework is used to provide estimates of what including agriculture under the Customs Union would mean for the sector and the economy. The paper also discusses the implications of fully aligning Turkey's agricultural policies with the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy, as would be required under full membership.
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政策研究报告 WPS7059 2014年10月1日
Larson, Donald F.; Martin, Will; Sahin, Sebnem; Tsigas, Marino
At the Davos forum of January 2014, a group of 14 countries pledged to launch negotiations on liberalizing trade in "green goods" (also known as "environmental" goods), focusing on the elimination of tariffs for an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation list of 54 products.
... 更多显示 The paper shows that the Davos group, with an average tariff of 1.8 percent, has little to offer as countries have avoided submitting products with tariff peaks for tariff reductions. Even if the list were extended to the 411 products on the World Trade Organization list, taking into account tariff dispersion, the tariff structure on environmental goods would be equivalent to a uniform tariff of 3.4 percent, about half the uniform tariff-equivalent for non-environmental goods. Enlarging the number of participants to low-income countries might be possible as, on average, their imports would not increase by more than 8 percent. However, because of the strong complementarities between trade in environmental goods and trade in environmental services, these should also be brought to the negotiation table, although difficulties in reaching agreement on their scope are likely to be great.
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This paper offers a simple way to assess the impact on the economy of Nigeria of an economic partnership agreement (EPA) between the ECOWAS countries and the European Union (EU) , based on the market access offer contained in the negotiation proposals in early 2014 with the following key elements: liberalization, to the benefit of the EU, of West African market access for 75 percent of tariff lines over a period of 20 years; three categories of products subject to gradual liberalization, in four stages of five years each, starting on December 31, 2019 for the first category being liberalized and finishing in 2035 for the third category.
... 更多显示 The fourth category of products, representing one quarter of all tariff lines, is not subject to liberalization; and possibility of recourse to trade defense measures, including bilateral safeguard measures (article 22) and an infant industry clause (article 23). The analysis presented in this paper is based on a new methodology that combines the advantages of a partial equilibrium modeling framework with the wealth of firm level information contained in a World Bank enterprise survey for Nigeria. The intention is to add value to the policy debate around the EPA by generating results that are intuitive and transparent to a non-technical audience, and that rely on a limited number of simple assumptions, while adding precision and detail to the expected impact on the domestic economy.
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工作文件 93166 2014年9月30日
von Uexkull, Erik Jan; Njinkeu, Dominique; Maur, Jean-Christophe; Coste, Antoine; Shui, Lulu
Some of the headings included in this issue of the Development Economics Prospects Group (DECPG) daily economic news are as follows: financial markets; high income economies; and developing economies in East Asia and Pacific and Europe and Central Asia.
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Some of the headings included in this issue of the Development Economics Prospects Group (DECPG) daily economic news are as follows: high income economies; and developing economies in Europe and Central Asia, Latin America and Caribbean, and South Asia.
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There is substantial evidence that with the progressive global decline in tariffs over several decades, trade costs are a more significant barrier to trade than tariffs, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa.
... 更多显示 This paper decomposes trade costs into three categories: costs that can be lowered by trade facilitation, nontariff barriers, and the costs of business services. The paper develops a 10-region, 18-sector, global trade model that includes Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Rwanda of the East African Customs Union. The analysis finds that deep integration in the East African Customs Union that lowers these trade costs results in significant gains for the four countries, especially from improved trade facilitation. Extending the lowering of nontariff barriers and services liberalization multilaterally would increase the gains between two and seven times, depending on the country. that the analysis also finds that reducing nondiscriminatory services barriers in Kenya and Tanzania would increase welfare even more than multilateral reduction of discriminatory services barriers. The paper is innovative both conceptually and empirically. It contains foreign direct investment in services and is the first paper to numerically assess liberalization of barriers against domestic and multinational service providers in a multi-sector, multi-region, applied general equilibrium model. The paper uses new databases of the ad valorem equivalents of barriers in services and the time in trade costs. Both databases are shown to be important to the results.
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政策研究报告 WPS7049 2014年9月1日
Balistreri, Edward J.; Tarr, David G.; Yonezawa, Hidemichi
This paper uses the gravity model to analyze whether the varying export performance of Croatian counties can be explained by their proximity to border gates, ports, and other county-specific characteristics.
... 更多显示 The analysis finds that longer distances to border gates increase trade frictions significantly for many product categories, although these frictions have been decreasing between 2007 and 2012. The paper analyzes the county specific factors that are associated with variation in export performance, net of distance. Results show that exports are strongly and positively correlated with motorway and road density, the size of the labor force, low-skill ratio, and the number of patents. These variables are also associated with a greater diversity of exports in terms of products and destinations. Several general policy implications are highlighted. The significant association between motorway and road density and export volume, number of destinations, as well as the diversity of exported products may indicate that improvements in connectivity and facilitation of transport could still play a significant role in enhancing regional trade outcomes. Similarly, good performance in research and development may significantly help to spur competitiveness and allow local producers to enter new markets in products and destinations, which in turn can increase the level of diversification and boost resilience to global economic shocks.
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政策研究报告 WPS6999 2014年8月1日
Artuc, Erhan; Iootty, Mariana; Pirlea, Ana Florina