What is the value of the WTO Committee on Agriculture? How much trade do countries talk about at the WTO? Do low-income countries participate less than they should in the work of the Committee? How important are issues not covered by notifications? What are the most important issues on which to...

This book explores the complex relationship between international trade and poverty reduction through a combination of research papers and contemporary case studies. Written mainly by developing-country authors in consultation with local businesses and communities, the case studies contribute to...

Trade policy reforms in recent decades have sharply reduced the distortions that were harming agriculture in de/veloping 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...

While barriers to trade in most goods and some services including capital flows have been reduced considerably over the past two decades, many remain. Such policies harm most the economies imposing them, but the worst of the merchandise barriers (in agriculture and textiles) are particularly...

Australia's lackluster 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 gradual...

Most of the world's poorest people depend on farming for their livelihood. Earnings from farming in low-income countries are depressed partly due to a pro-urban bias in own-country policies, and partly because richer countries (including some developing countries) favor their farmers with import...

The authors illustrate some of the potential consequences of the World Trade Organization's Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations on incomes and poverty globally. Using the global LINKAGE model to generate changes in domestic and international prices that have a direct impact on factor...

In 1990, Australia and New Zealand were ranked around 25th and 37th in terms of Gross National Product (GNP) per capita, having been the highest-income countries in the world one hundred years earlier. Those countries relatively poor economic growth performance over that long period contrasts...

This chapter begins with a brief summary of economic growth and structural changes in the region since the 1950s and of agricultural and other economic policies as they affected agriculture before and after the various reforms, and in several cases fundamental regime changes, of the past...