Agricultural trade is vitally important for achieving the goal of ending hunger by 2030 enshrined in the second Sustainable Development Goal (SDG). While trade is frequently seen as posing threats to this vitally important goal, it can in fact play a major role in achieving it. Trade helps in a...

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...

Most of the large tariff reductions achieved in multilateral tradenegotiations have involved tariff-cutting formulas such as the "Swiss"formula. However, wide variations in initial tariff rates between activeparticipants call for new approaches under the Doha Development Agenda.This paper...

Protection unconstrained by rules often varies substantially over time. Rules-based disciplines likeOECD industrial tariff bindings negotiated under GATT since 1947 and new Uruguay Roundbindings on agricultural and services trade and on developing country industrial tariffs, constrain...

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

Global food prices have increased substantially since mid-2010, as have prices in many developing countries. In this study we assess the poverty impact of the price changes between June and December 2010 in twenty-eight low and middle income countries. This is done by gathering detailed...

For individual countries, variable trade barriers can be used to reduce the volatility of domestic relative to world prices. If this is done by countries accounting for a large share of the market, its effect is offset by increases in world price volatility. This study shows the nature of the...

Traditional weighted-average measures of trade distortions are widely used in analyzing global and regional reforms, despite well-known deficiencies. This paper develops and applies optimal aggregators for the real-world case of multiple countries and commodities with much more detailed...