Recent work on China's accession to the World Trade Organizations pays little attention to the wave of reforms in China in the 1980s and 1990s. These reforms created the preconditions for accession and strongly influenced its outcomes. The preeminence of processing trade at the time of accession...

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...

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...

This paper uses detailed data on bound and applied tariffs to assess the consequences of the World Trade Organization’s December 2008 Modalities for tariffs levied and faced by developing countries, and the welfare implications of these reforms. The authors find that the tiered formula for...

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 examines the extent to which various regions, and the world as a whole, could gain from multilateral trade reform over the next decade. The World BankÂ’s LINKAGE model of the global economy is employed to examine the impact first of current trade barriers and agricultural...

This paper examines whether the Sub-Saharan African economies could gain from multilateral trade reform in the presence of trade preferences. The World BankÂ’s LINKAGE model of the global economy is employed to examine the impact first of current trade barriers and agricultural subsidies, and...

Rapid changes in global food prices in recent years are widely viewed as a serious threat to global development. While various sources of price instability in agriculture have been identified, little attention appears to have been given to the importance of changes in trade policies that...

In this paper, we provide an overview of the agricultural trade negotiations within the current World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations and we show that including agriculture in the Doha Development Agenda talks is important both economically and politically, although the political...