This paper examines whether strategic trade behavior can explain the fact that the US, Japanese and European Patent Offices – the USPTO, the JPO and the EPO – often make different decisions about whether to grant (or reject) a given patent application. We analyse this issue by...

A successful agreement on agriculture is essential for an overall agreement under the WTOÂ’s Doha trade negotiations. Reaching agreement has been difficult, and as of August 2007, much still remains to be done if a successful agreement is to be reached. We consider three of the most...

This paper estimates the effects on production, trade and economic welfare of current trade policy regimes throughout the world on Uganda relative to other economies, as a benchmark against which to examine various multilateral and preferential trade policy scenarios that might emerge over the...

AustraliaÂ’s lacklustre economic growth performance in the first four decades following World War II was in part due to an anti-trade, anti-primary sector bias in government assistance policies. This paper provides new annual estimates of the extent of those biases since 1946 and their...

For decades, earnings from farming in many low-income countries have been depressed by a pro-urban bias in own-country policies, as well as by governments of richer countries favoring their farmers with import barriers and subsidies. Both sets of policies reduce national and global economic...

This paper surveys the contributions of economists since the 1960s to our understanding of AustraliaÂ’s evolving production and trade pattern and to the policies affecting it. Changes in comparative advantage only partly explain the trade pattern. Much of the residual explanation has to do...

A common-agency lobbying model is developed to help understand why North America and the European Union have adopted such different policies towards genetically modified food. Our results show that when firms (in this case farmers) lobby policy makers to influence standards and consumers and...

How much might the potential economic benefit from a farm productivity boost associated with crop biotechnology adoption by Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) be offset by a loss of market access abroad for crops that may contain genetically modified (GM) organisms? This paper uses the global GTAP...

A global economy-wide model (GTAP) is used to go beyond estimating how GM crop variety adoption affects adopting and non-adopting economies, with or without policy responses to this technology, by indicating effects also on real incomes of farmers. The results suggest the EU moratorium on...

The dispute resolution procedures of the World Trade Organization allow sanctions to be imposed when a country is unwilling to bring a WTO-inconsistent trade measure into conformity. Apart from the fact that the procedure for triggering the retaliation process has ambiguities that need to be...