Will Martin - Böcker

Despite the decision of the WTO members to launch a new round of negotiations at their Doha Ministerial in November 2001, developing countries continue to have very real concerns on a number of key issues. The successful completion of the Doha trade round and the realization of the goals of its Development Agenda represent a major challenge for both the developed and the developing world. The primary aim of this volume is to improve understanding of the issues, the objectives of policy and the options for trade policy reform particularly as they impact on the Asia-Pacific region. A team of authors from developing and developed countries in the Asia-Pacific identify ways in which progress might be made on the key negotiating topics, including market access and related issues in agriculture, non-agriculture merchandise and in trade in services.

The fifteen years of the GATT between the conclusion of the Tokyo Round in 1979 and the finalisation of the Uruguay Round in 1994 witnessed a sea change in attitudes toward the role of international trade in developing countries. The shift in orientation toward relatively open trading systems was reflected in the attitudes and participation of developing countries in the Uruguay Round. They involved themselves fully in formulating the rules of the new trading system, and also made significant offers to reduce tariff protection. This volume provides an assessment of the economic impact of the Uruguay Round of the GATT on the developing countries. The authors, all leading international trade economists, examine all aspects of the agreement and conclude that the cuts in protection should strengthen the world trading system and result in increases in the real incomes in developing countries.

Despite the decision of the WTO members to launch a new round of negotiations at their Doha Ministerial in November 2001, developing countries continue to have very real concerns on a number of key issues. The successful completion of the Doha trade round and the realization of the goals of its Development Agenda represent a major challenge for both the developed and the developing world. The primary aim of this volume is to improve understanding of the issues, the objectives of policy and the options for trade policy reform particularly as they impact on the Asia-Pacific region. A team of authors from developing and developed countries in the Asia-Pacific identify ways in which progress might be made on the key negotiating topics, including market access and related issues in agriculture, non-agriculture merchandise and in trade in services.

This volume brings together a selection of papers that were prepared as background analyses for a collaborative research capacity-building project, focusing on the WTO negotiating agenda. Contributors review the results of the Uruguay Round negotiations, discuss developing country concerns relating to the operation of the WTO and assess implementation of WTO agreements. Contributors quantify the potential benefits of further global liberalization of access to markets for industrial and agricultural products, and assess the relative merits of expanding multilateral disciplines into new areas such as investment, competition, and labor and environmental policies.

Distortions to Agricultural incentives in Asia is the third volume in a series of books that brings together analytical narratives of the evolution over the past half-century of policy-imposed distortions to farmer incentives and food prices in 80 countries. Drawing on new consistent set of estimates spanning 90 percent of the world's agricultural markets. The first two titles in the series focus on Europe's transitional economies and Latin America. Future titles will focus on Africa and the distortions to agricultural incentives from a global perspective.

The prices of farm products are crucial determinants of the extent of poverty and inequality in the world. The vast majority of the world's poorest households depend to a considerable extent on farming for their incomes, while food represents a large component of the consumption of all poor households. For generations, food prices have been heavily distorted by government policies in high-income and developing countries. Many countries began to reform their agricultural price and trade policies in the 1980s, but government policy intervention is still considerable and still favors farmers in high-income countries at the expense of many farmers in developing countries. What would be the poverty and inequality consequences of the removal of the remaining distortions to agricultural incentives? This question is of great relevance to governments in evaluating ways to engage in multilateral and regional trade negotiations or to improve their own policies unilaterally.Agricultural Price Distortions, Inequality, and Poverty analyses the effects of agricultural and trade policies around the world on national and regional economic welfare, on income inequality among and within countries, and on the level and incidence of poverty in developing countries. The studies include economy-wide analyses of the inequality and poverty effects of own-country policies compared with rest-of-the-world policies for 10 individual developing countries in three continents. This book also includes three chapters that each use a separate global economic model to examine the effects of policies on aggregate poverty and the distribution of poverty across many identified developing countries. This study is motivated by two policy issues: first, the World Trade Organization's struggle to conclude the Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations, in which agricultural policy reform is, again, one of the most contentious topics in the talks and, second, the struggle of the developing countries to achieve their Millennium Development Goals by 2015 - notably the alleviation of hunger and poverty - which depends crucially on policies that affect agricultural incentives.