Small countries may benefit from the formation of a trade bloc, since their combined market power will enable them to manipulate the terms of trade. The question of interest is whether countries will benefit from the enlargement of a trading bloc, if trade liberalization induces countries to...

This paper identifies and analyzes the changes that have occurred in terms of territorial and commodity structure of agrarian trade (exports) of countries of the Visegrad Group (or V4 -i.e. Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia) in the period 1993-2008. In terms of methodological...

The European Union decided in June 2003 a new reform of its farm policy with a new step toward the decoupling of farm income support instruments. Available impact studies find that this reform will reduce production incentives, substantially for beef and to a lesser extent for arable crops. All...

Trading schemes for emission allowances have become a panacea for nations aspiring toreduce their aggregate emissions of greenhouse gases from industry in a cost-effectivemanner. The contention of this paper is that an emissions trading scheme (ETS) shouldnot be based on blanket coverage of...

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the competitive performance of the EU countries for food trade in the European market during the period 1990-2003. To assess such performance the analysis considers comparative advantage and evaluates three indices: export market share (EMS), revealed...

In October 2004 the European Union and the MERCOSUR tried to reach an agreement for creating what would be the world's largest free-trade area accounting for 650 millions people. But despite five years of bilateral work to strike a deal, the two parties stayed on ropes at their meeting in...

The European Union is bound by World Trade Organisation agreements to move to a tariff-only import system for bananas by no later than 1 January 2006. From that date, imports from non-ACP countries will be subject to a single tariff while ACP country bananas will continue to enter the EU market...

Based on the international legal framework as established by the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), the author discusses the approach to GI protection under South African law. While South Africa has not introduced a registration system with regard to GIs,...

The 2003 reform of the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) replaced the coupled direct support schemes by a Single Farm Payment (SFP), which will be mainly delivered to farmers irrespective of what they produce (hence 'decoupled' from production). The level of decoupling differs...

This paper provides new evidence on income and price elasticities of demand for agricultural exports from Mercosur countries to the EU. Econometric models are constructed for eight agricultural commodities - beef, cocoa, coffee, orange juice, poultry, sugar, soya and wheat - exported from...