Multilateral trade negotiations limited to agriculture started again in March 2000. Set out in Article 20 of the Agreement on Agriculture, they are among the WTOs built-in agenda commitments which Member countries entered into when signing the Final Act Embodying the Results of the Uruguay Round...

This guide shows how a life cycle approach can be used to identify and reduce the environmental and health impacts of the products we use. It underlines the importance of considering these issues across the entire life cycle of a product and sets them within the context of policy development,...

This Country Focus studies the development of private consumption in France during the decade before the crisis. Are French consumers greater spendthrifts than their European fellows? In this paper, we estimate a consumption function to show that strong growth of private consumption in France...

In Germany private consumption virtually stagnated for nearly a decade and clearly lagged behind GDP growth. This Country Focus uses the estimation of a consumption function to show that the drop in employment is the most important factor behind the reluctance to consume in the first half of...

Chinese accession to the WTO will give it the right to participate in the current agriculturalnegotiations. An obvious question is whether China’s accession is likely to make agreementin the agricultural negotiations easier or more difficult. China’s WTO membership will affectthe alliances...

This information note is part of the European Commission's Agenda for Change, in which sustainable agriculture is a priority. It begins with an executive summary (Chapter 2), followed by a discussion of the importance of smallholder access to agricultural markets in Chapter 3. Chapters 4 to 7...