Little progress has been made since the creation of the WTO in expanding and deepening the coverage of services liberalization commitments. This paper identifies and discusses five hypotheses that may explain the absence of dynamism: (i) technological changes allow ever more services to be...

This paper empirically explores the political-economic determinants of why governments choose to tax or subsidize trade in agriculture. We use a new data set on nominal rates of assistance (NRA) across a number of commodities spanning the last four decades for 64 countries. NRAs measure the...

A significant body of research has sought to examine claims that developing countries are under-represented as complainants, and/or over-represented as respondents in the WTO dispute settlement system. Most of this literature has focused on their propensity to participate, the idea being that...

Extensive research has demonstrated the existence of large potential welfare gains from trade facilitation - measures to reduce the overall costs of the international movement of goods. From an equity perspective an important question is how those benefits are distributed across and within...

Extensive research has demonstrated the existence of large potential welfare gains from measures to facilitate trade - reduce trade costs - for African countries in particular. However, concerns have been expressed by policymakers regarding the distribution of the benefits and costs of trade...

This paper analyses a number of the challenges confronting developing countries seeking to use the WTO Doha negotiations to promote their economic growth and performance. A precondition for success is to have clear objectives and to take a proactive stance. But a key necessary condition for...

A new round of WTO negotiations on agriculture, services and perhaps some other issues is expected to be launched in late 1999. To what extent should those negotiations include so-called "new trade agenda" items aimed at ensuring that domestic regulatory policies do not discriminate against...

It often appears self-evident that regional integration arrangements (RIAs) result in more far-reaching liberalization of intra-bloc trade than is possible if countries restrict themselves to a multilateral approach. This paper considers whether such arrangements do in fact imply, or facilitate,...

Although average tariffs in Quad markets are very low, tariff peaks and tariff escalation have a disproportional effect on exports from least developed countries (LDCs). Tariff peak products tend to be heavily concentrated in agriculture and food products and in labour-intensive sectors such as...