The authors argue that India should engage more actively in the multilateral trading system for four reasons: First, such engagement could facilitate domestic reform, and improve access to export markets. If the government could show that domestic reform would pay off with increased access to...

The author presents a tariff index that uses constant-elasticity-of-substitution aggregators of tariff line data to calculate how preferential tariff reductions affect both prices and average tariff rates. A simple general-equilibrium model with sector-specific factors of production can be...

The Uruguay Round agreements on agriculture were intended to move member countries toward a fair and market-oriented agricultural trading system. By progressively reducing domestic government support and export subsidies, converting nontariff barriers to tariffs, and reducing barriers to market...

The authors discuss options that could be considered in the World Trade Organization (WTO) to provide more favorable treatment-so-called special and differential treatment (SDT)-to small and low-income countries. They argue that there is a need both for differentiation across WTO members and for...

The Uruguay Round agreements established the World Trade Organization (WTO), overhauled and strengthened the GATT rules on trade in goods, and added rules on trade in services and intellectual property. Individual countries made wide-ranging commitments to liberalize trade policies. A new round...

The methodological problems associated with standard partial equilibrium models may impart a significant bias in their projections of the trade effects of tariff cuts. First, these models fail to account for the price-raising effects of nontariff barriers (NTBs) that shift the supply curve for...

The authors examine how the economic interactions between rapidly emerging China and the rest of the world may evolve over the coming two decades. They discuss China's growth potential, drawing a parallel between China's rise and the historical rise of Britain, Japan and the United States....

A concern about regional trade arrangements (RTAs) is whether the discriminatory trade barriers applied to RTAs encourage high-cost imports from member countries at the expense of nonmember lower-cost goods. RTA impact evaluations have been hampered by a lack of appropriate empirical procedures...

The authors examine the wide-ranging and fundamental trade reforms undertaken in 16 Latin American and Caribbean countries in the 1980s. These reforms have dramatically altered the nature of the trade regimes in these countries and are particularly significant because they were undertaken during...

This paper considers the challenges and opportunities facing the Central American countries and explores the choices open to them for fuller integration into the world economy. The paper presents a brief historical account of the origins and evolution of the Central American Common Market...