Many trade negotiations involve large cuts in high tariffs, with flexibilities allowing much smaller cuts for an agreed number of politically-sensitive products. The effects of these flexibilities on market access opportunities are difficult to predict, creating particular problems for...

The recent public economics literature involves an apparent consensus that income effects reduce the costs of raising revenues and hence increase the desirable level of public good provision. Higher taxes can indeed reduce the demand for leisure -- and hence increase the supply of taxed labor --...

The Special Safeguard Mechanism was a key issue in the July 2008 failure to reach agreement in the World Trade Organization negotiations under the Doha Development Agenda. It includes both price and quantity-triggered measures. This paper uses a stochastic simulation model of the world wheat...

The Doha Round must be concluded not because it will produce dramatic liberalization but because it will create greater security of market access. Its conclusion would strengthen, symbolically and substantively, the WTO’s valuable role in restraining protectionism in the current downturn. What...

Efficient reduction of carbon dioxide emissions requires coordination of international efforts. Approaches proposed include carbon taxes, emission quotas, and jointly implemented energy projects. To reduce emissions efficiently, requires equalizing the marginal costs of reduction between...

It is commonly believed that taxing agricultural commodities in developing countries, and subsidizing agricultural commodities in industrial countries, reduces incentives in the developing countries for both current production and longer-term investments in capital, knowledge, technology, and...

Anderson and Martin provide simple, robust rules for evaluating public spending in distorted economies. Their analysis integrates, within a clean unified framework, previous treatments of project evaluation as special cases. In this paper, the authors use a general system of fiscal accounting...

The outlines of a potential agreement, emerging after seven years of negotiations, imply that Doha offers three key benefits: reduced uncertainty of market access in goods and services; improved market access in agriculture and manufacturing; and the mobilization of resources to deal with the...

Before reform, China's trade was dominated by a few foreign trade corporations with monopolies on the trade of specific ranges of products. Planners could control imports through these corporations so there was little need for conventional instruments such as tariffs, quotas, and licenses. Trade...

Emphasizing the importance of evaluating the Uruguay Round in the context of a changing world economy, the authors base their projections on a model that incorporates certain economic shifts: 1) that the center of economic gravity will shift toward the South and toward Asia (a shift that is...