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espanolEl articulo introduce una revision a partir del analisis economico del derecho. En ese sentido, analiza la aplicacion de medidas en frontera en terminos de “el derecho y sus consecuencias”. Este mecanismo de precaucion aplicado por las aduanas en los limites aereos, maritimos y terrestres preven la suspension del despacho de aduanas de las mercancias que puedan infringir. Recurre por lo tanto al metodo teorico-descriptivo para efectuar una descripcion consistente en un contexto donde existen amplios incentivos perversos para la importacion y/o exportacion de copias no autorizadas. La primera seccion se enfoca en la facilitacion contra el reglamento y el control aduanero del comercio. A continuacion, la segunda parte aborda la relevancia del control aduanero de bienes de importacion y exportacion en ecuador. La tercera explora la trascendencia de las medidas en frontera (ambito penal y competencia desleal). La cuarta seccion considera en un sentido teorico el impacto en los costos de transaccion en las operaciones de importacion y exportacion. Finalmente, el documento desarrolla una comparacion entre normas y procedimientos nacionales con el tipo de solicitud de medida de frontera realizada por otros paises de la comunidad andina de naciones unidas. Se concluye que la adopcion del mecanismo puede generar altos costos administrativos y de transaccion en las operaciones de importacion y exportacion, debido a la ausencia de reglas del juego y procedimientos automatizados mas eficientes y bajo un esquema de mejora continua. EnglishThis paper introduces a review based on the economic analysis of the law. In that sense, it analyzes the application of border measures in terms of “the right and its consequences”. This mechanism of precaution applied by the customs in the air, maritime and terrestrial limits foresees the suspension of the customs clearance of the merchandise that may infringe. He therefore resorts to the theoretical-descriptive method to make a consistent description in a context where there are ample perverse incentives for the import and/or export of unauthorized copies. The first section focuses on facilitation against regulation and customs control of trade. Next, the second part addresses the relevance of customs control of import and export goods in Ecuador. The third explores the importance of border measures (criminal and unfair competition). The fourth section considers in a theoretical sense the impact on transaction costs in import and export operations. Finally, the document develops a comparison between national norms and procedures with the type of request for a border measure made by other countries of the Andean community of the United Nations. It is concluded that the adoption of the mechanism can generate high administrative and transaction costs in import and export operations, due to the absence of rules of the game and more efficient automated procedures and under a continuous improvement scheme.

Background With more countries exiting lockdown, public health safety requires screening measures at international travel entry points that can prevent the reintroduction or importation of the severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus-2. Here, we estimate the number of cases captured, quarantining days averted and secondary cases expected to occur with screening interventions. Methods To estimate active case exportation risk from 153 countries with recorded coronavirus disease-2019 cases and deaths, we created a simple data-driven framework to calculate the number of infectious and upcoming infectious individuals out of 100 000 000 potential travellers from each country, and assessed six importation risk reduction strategies; Strategy 1 (S1) has no screening on entry, S2 tests all travellers and isolates test-positives where those who test negative at 7 days are permitted entry, S3 the equivalent but for a 14 day period, S4 quarantines all travellers for 7 days where all are subsequently permitted entry, S5 the equivalent for 14 days and S6 the testing of all travellers and prevention of entry for those who test positive. Results The average reduction in case importation across countries relative to S1 is 90.2% for S2, 91.7% for S3, 55.4% for S4, 91.2% for S5 and 77.2% for S6. An average of 79.6% of infected travellers are infectious upon arrival. For the top 100 exporting countries, an 88.2% average reduction in secondary cases is expected through S2 with the 7-day isolation of test-positives, increasing to 92.1% for S3 for 14-day isolation. A substantially smaller reduction of 30.0% is expected for 7-day all traveller quarantining, increasing to 84.3% for 14-day all traveller quarantining. Conclusions The testing and isolation of test-positives should be implemented provided good testing practices are in place. If testing is not feasible, quarantining for a minimum of 14 days is recommended with strict adherence measures in place.

‘Immunity passport’ (also called ''immunity certificate'' or ''immunity license'' has been suggested to certify traveler’ protection from SARS-CoV-2 infection. Some data have demonstrated development of neutralizing antibodies that may protect against reinfection and reduce disease severity in the short-term, and some tests correlate with virus neutralization. More evidence is needed on serologies for such certification to facilitate travel, to protect travelers and their destination countries.

El presente documento realiza un estudio preliminar del capítulo XX relativo a propiedad intelectual del Acuerdo MERCOSUR – UE de libre comercio, MERCOSUR logró en este capítulo que la UE hiciera tabla rasa respecto de los anteriores acuerdos de libre comercio. Se arribó a un resultado equilibrado, que refleja las concesiones de ambas partes.

Executive Summary This submission provides a critical analysis of the copyright sections of Chapter 18 of the Trans-Pacific Partnership on intellectual property. In National Interest Analysis, the Australian Government asserts that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is a merely recapitulation of existing agreements: "The TPP Intellectual Property Chapter is consistent with Australia’s existing intellectual property regime and will not require any changes to Australia’s legislation. Minor regulatory changes relating to encoded broadcasts will be required to extend to Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei Darussalam and New Zealand the benefits in Part VAA of the Copyright Act 1968 that Australia already extends to parties to the International Convention for the Protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting Organizations 1961 (the Rome Convention). The TPP does not require an increase in the term of copyright protection in Australia, nor any other changes to Australia’s copyright regime, including with respect to technological protection measures. The TPP standard with respect to ISPs is consistent with Australia’s existing ISP liability regime and will not require ISPs to monitor, report or penalise copyright infringement." However, such an assertion is not well-founded. A close examination of the Trans-Pacific Partnership reveals that the agreement has obligations above and beyond existing agreements – such as the TRIPS Agreement 1994 and the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement 2004. Recommendation 1 - The Trans-Pacific Partnership distorts the aims, objectives, and principles of copyright law. The agreement privileges a corporatist view of copyright law, and seeks to enhance the rights and remedies of copyright owners. The trade agreement is unbalanced. There is a failure to properly represent the traditional objectives of copyright law in promoting learning, access to knowledge, and scientific progress. Moreover, the Trans-Pacific Partnership does not promote copyright goals – such as creativity, innovation, competition, and access to goods and services. Recommendation 2 - The copyright term extension in the Trans-Pacific Partnership will have significant economic, cultural, and innovation costs for Australia and other countries in the Pacific Rim. The Productivity Commission rightly highlights public policy problems in respect of long copyright terms and orphan works. Australia needs to develop law reform solutions for such problems. Recommendation 3 - The Trans-Pacific Partnership has vague, ambiguous and complex language on copyright exceptions and limitations. While the United States enjoys a broad and flexible defence of fair use, many other Pacific Rim countries lack such expansive copyright exceptions. The Productivity Commission makes a strong case about why Australia should adopt a defence of fair use to promote innovation, competition, and consumer welfare. Recommendation 4 - The Trans-Pacific Partnership has detailed, prescriptive text on intermediary liability and copyright law. It is questionable whether this anachronistic model is appropriate and well-adapted for Australia in the digital age. Recommendation 5 - The Trans-Pacific Partnership seeks to lock in United States-style provisions in respect of technological protection measures. This is unwise – given concerns about the efficacy of the regime; the collateral impact of uber-copyright on a range of other public policy interests; and the current constitutional challenge to the technological protection measures regime in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998 (US). Recommendation 6 - The Trans-Pacific Partnership also seeks to embed a United States-style regime in relation to electronic rights management information. Again, such an approach is questionable – given that such measures have proven to have little utility. Recommendation 7 - The Trans-Pacific Partnership provides for an arsenal of copyright enforcement measures – relating to civil remedies, criminal offences, border measures, government computer software, satellite piracy, and law enforcement co-operation. There has been significant about whether such measures are balanced and proportionate. Moreover, there have been larger concerns about the impact of the Trans-Pacific Partnership upon due process, privacy, civil liberties, freedom of speech, and human rights. Recommendation 8 - Other Chapters of the Trans-Pacific Partnership – dealing with Investment, and Electronic Commerce – reinforce and exacerbate a number of the problems with the Intellectual Property Chapter. Providing copyright owners with a super-remedy of Investor-State Dispute Settlement is a startling, radical new power. Recommendation 9 - Furthermore, the Trans-Pacific Partnership will result in greater fragmentation of international regulation and governance of copyright law and electronic commerce. The regional agreement will dilute the key role of international organisations such as the World Intellectual Property Organization, and the World Trade Organization. There will also be complications over the relationship between Australia’s bilateral copyright obligations, and the proposed new regional agreement. A copyright trade dispute, for instance, between Australia and the United States could be played out in state-state dispute settlement under the World Trade Organization, the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement 2004, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and investor-state dispute settlement.

Recent data show that the institutional content of preferential trade agreements has evolved over time. Although pre-1990s preferential trade agreements mostly focused on tariff liberalization, recent agreements increasingly contain deep provisions in diverse areas, such as intellectual property rights, investment, and standards. At the same time, there has been a remarkable increase in the internationalization of production through foreign direct investment and outsourcing. This paper employs the Antràs and Helpman (2008) model of contractual frictions and global sourcing to study how deep trade agreements affect the international organization of production. The paper constructs new measures of the depth of preferential trade agreements and of vertical foreign direct investment to test the theory. Consistent with the model, the analysis finds evidence that the depth of trade agreements is correlated with vertical foreign direct investment, and that this is driven by the provisions that improve the contractibility of inputs provided by suppliers, such as regulatory provisions. Because this implication of the model is specific to the so-called “property rights” theory of the multinational firm, the findings provide empirical support to this approach vis-à-vis alternative theories of firm boundaries.

A structural gravity model is used to estimate barriers to services trade across many sectors, countries, and time. Since the disaggregated output data needed to infer border barriers flexibly are often missing for services, this paper derives a novel methodology for projecting output data. The empirical implementation sheds light on the role of institutions, geography, size, and digital infrastructure as determinants of border barriers. The paper finds that border barriers have generally fallen over time, but there are differences across sectors and countries. Notably, border effects for the smallest economies have remained stable, giving rise to a divergent pattern across countries.

This paper views tariff-cutting formulas as a potential solution to the free-rider problem that arises when market opening is negotiated bilaterally and extended on a most-favored-nation basis. The negotiators in the Doha Agenda chose formulas that are ideal from an economic efficiency viewpoint in that they most sharply reduce the highest and most economically-costly tariffs. When the political support that gave rise to the original tariffs is considered, however, this approach appears to generate very high political costs per unit of gain in economic efficiency. The political costs associated with the formulas appear to have led to strong pressure for many, complex exceptions, which both lowered and increased uncertainty about members’ market access gains. Where tariff cuts focus on applied rates, it seems likely that a proportional cut rule would reduce the political costs of securing agreements. However, detailed examination of the Doha proposals with their product exceptions suggests that negotiators are likely to find cuts with exceptions politically attractive but economically costly when cuts are based on bound tariffs with different degrees of binding overhang.

The WTO has delivered policy outcomes that are very different from those likely to emerge out of the recent wave of preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Should economists see this as an efficient institutional hand-off, where the WTO has carried trade liberalization as far as it can manage, and is now passing the baton to PTAs to finish the job? This paper surveys a growing economics literature on international trade agreements and argues on this basis that the WTO is not passé. Rather, and subject to some caveats, this survey of research to date suggests that the WTO warrants strong support while a more cautious view of PTAs seems appropriate.

Financial support received by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7 2007-2011 under Grant Agreement n° 290693 FOODSECUREFinancial support received by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7 2007-2011under Grant Agreement n° 290693 FOODSECURE; Food security is a major concern, especially for developing countries where a large percentage ofpopulation lives in rural areas and where agricultural sector represents an important weight in theireconomy. Agricultural and food imports play a particular key role in terms of food security in lowincome countries. Indeed, dependency on imports for food may raise a problem for food security inparticular in the case of sudden price increase which put up national food bill. The national state offood availability combining food imports and domestic food production thus constitutes some crucialinformation. Following Diaz-Bonilla et al. (2000), this contribution aims to shed light on thedeterminants of food security at national level. We first build a theoretical framework linkingexplicitly food security measured by the Bonilla index (BI) and national intervention policyintervention in agriculture. Second, the empirical methodology aims at assessing the impact ofnational policy responses to 2008 price surge in terms of food security using the national rateassistance (NRA) index on importable food products for 42 countries over the period 1995-2010. Ourresults suggest that most developing countries have largely used their possibility to play with the NRAlevel in order to moderate BI during the 2008 food price surge.

In this paper, analysis is presented relating to the impact of border measures for climate policy on the problem of carbon leakage, and the related issue of competitiveness in the US aluminum industry, which can be characterized as oligopolistic. Specifically, it is shown that an appropriate border measure depends on the nature of competition in aluminum production, as well as the basis for assessing the trade neutrality of any border measure. If trade neutrality is defined in terms of market volume, even though carbon leakage is reduced, US aluminum producer competitiveness cannot be maintained. This compares to defining trade neutrality in terms of market share, which results in US aluminum producer competitiveness being maintained and global carbon emissions being reduced. In either case, US users of aluminum incur deadweight losses.

In this paper I sketch out the rough contours of the challenge faced by the WTO in dealing with non-tariff measures (NTMs) as seen from the economic theories of trade agreements. The key questions for the WTO - the answers to which largely dictate the choice between shallow and deep approaches to integration - appear to be two: (1) Is it the terms-of-trade problem or the commitment problem that WTO member governments seek to solve with their WTO membership?; and (2) Is it market clearing or offshoring/bilateral bargaining that is now the most prominent mechanism for the determination of international prices? I suggest that evidence on the first question points to the terms-of-trade theory and hence toward shallow integration, but that answering the second question may be the key to identifying the best way forward on NTMs for the WTO.

This paper analyzes the economic effects of agricultural price and merchandise trade policies around the world as of 2004 on global markets, net farm incomes, and national and regional economic welfare and poverty, using the global economy wide Linkage model, new estimates of agricultural price distortions for developing countries, and poverty elasticity's approach. It addresses two questions: to what extent are policies as of 2004 still reducing rewards from farming in developing countries and thereby adding to inequality across countries in farm household incomes? Are they depressing value added more in primary agriculture than in the rest of the economy of developing countries, and earnings of unskilled workers more than of owners of other factors of production, thereby potentially contributing to inequality and poverty within developing countries (given that farm incomes are well below non-farm incomes in most developing countries and that agriculture there is intensive in the use of unskilled labor)? Results are presented for the key countries and regions of the world and for the world as a whole. They reveal that, by moving to free markets, income inequality between countries will be reduced at least slightly, all but one-sixth of the gains to developing countries will come from agricultural policy reform, unskilled workers in developing countries the majority of whom work on farms will benefit most from reform, net farm incomes in developing countries will rise by 6 percent compared with 2 percent for non-agricultural value added, and the number of people surviving on less than US$1 a day will drop 3 percent globally.

During the 1960s and 1970s most developing countries imposed anti-agricultural policies, while many high-income countries restricted agricultural imports and subsidized their farmers. Both sets of policies inhibited economic growth and poverty alleviation in developing countries, while doing little to assist small farmers in high-income countries. Since the 1980s, however, many developing countries began to reduce the anti-agricultural bias of sectoral policies, and from the early 1990s the European Union began to move away from price supports to more-direct forms of farm income payments. This paper summarizes a forthcoming book that seeks to explain this evolving pattern of distortions to incentives conceptually and econometrically by making use of new political economy theory and a new globally comprehensive and consistent set of estimates of the changing extent of annual distortions over the past half-century. The distortion estimates involve more than 70 products that cover around 70 percent of the value of agricultural output in each of 75 countries that together account for over 90 percent of the global economy, and they expose the contribution of the various policy instruments (both farm and non-farm) to the net distortion to farmer incentives. Such a widespread coverage of countries, products, years and policy instruments has allowed this collection of studies to test a wide range of hypotheses suggested by the new political economy literature, including the importance of institutions. As a set it sheds much new light on the underlying forces that have affected incentives facing farmers in the course of national and global economic and political development, and hence on how those distortions might change in the future - or be changed by concerted actions to offset political pressures from traditionally powerful vested interests.

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the extent to which trade agreements affect agricultural trade policy volatility. Using a new panel database compiled as part of the World Bank's agricultural distortions research project, the author estimate the effect of regionalism on the volatility of price distortions measured by the absolute value of their first differences, averaged, for each country and year, over all agricultural goods. Using an instrumental-variable approach to correct for the endogeneity of regional trade agreements, (RTAs), the author fined that participation in RTAs has a significantly negative effect on agricultural trade-policy volatility. The author find that the World Trade Organization (WTO) agricultural agreement also contributed to reducing agricultural trade-policy volatility, in spite of the weak disciplines involved, but the effect is only weakly identified. The results are robust to a variety of robustness checks and hold, in particular, for the Latin American sub-sample.

This chapter begins with a brief summary of the long history of national distortions to agricultural markets. It then outlines the methodology used to generate annual indicators of the extent of government interventions in markets, details of which are provided in Anderson and appendix A. A description of the economies under study and their economic growth and structural changes over recent decades is then briefly presented as a preface to the main section of the chapter, in which the nominal rates of assistance and consumer tax equivalents (NRA and CTE) estimates are summarized across regions and over the decades since the 1950s. These estimates are discussed in far more detail in the regional chapters that follow. A summary is also provided of an additional set of indicators of agricultural price distortions presented in chapter eleven that are based on the trade restrictiveness index first developed by Anderson and Neary (2005). In chapter twelve the focus shifts from countries to commodities, and all the various distortion indicators are used to provide a sense of how distorted are each of the key farm commodity markets globally. Then chapter thirteen uses the study's NRA and CTE estimates to provide a new set of results from a global economy-wide model that attempts to quantify the impacts on global markets, net farm incomes and welfare of the reforms since the early 1980s and of the policies still in place as of 2004. The chapter concludes by drawing on the lessons learned to speculate on the prospects for further reducing the disarray in world agricultural markets.

Despite reforms over the past quarter-century, world agricultural markets remain highly distorted by government policies. Traditional indicators of those price distortions such as the nominal rate of assistance and consumer tax equivalent provide measures of the degree of intervention, but they can be misleading as indicators of the true effects of those policies. By drawing on recent theoretical literature that provides indicators of the trade- and welfare-reducing effects of price and trade policies, this paper develops more-satisfactory indexes for capturing distortions to agricultural incentives. It then exploits the agricultural distortion database recently compiled by the World Bank to generate estimates of them for both developing and high-income countries over the past half century, based on a sample of 75 countries that together account for all but one-tenth of the world's population, gross domestic product (GDP) and agricultural production. While they are still only partial equilibrium measures, they provide a much better approximation of the true trade and welfare effects of sectoral policies without needing a formal model of global markets or even price elasticity estimates.

Can the European Union (EU) introduce trade restrictive border measures under the auspices of environmental protection, whose purpose is at least inter alia to ‘level the competitive playing field’ for the European carbon-intensive industries? Should the World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement bodies be the final instance for deciding the legality of European climate change legislation measures? Europe is tightening its climate change policy, which inevitably increases costs for European producers. Global deviation in greenhouse gas emission reduction efforts has raised concerns about carbon leakage and deterioration in the competitiveness of European industries. To cope with these threats, the introduction of trade measures linked to the content of other countries’ environmental policy has been suggested. The revised Directive 2009/29/EC on the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) accordingly lead the way forward with regard to implementing special provisions such as free allocation of allowances or a “carbon equalization system”. Constituting a restriction of free trade, the announced measures are bound to clash with the multilateral trading rules of the WTO. This article checks the conformity of the anticipated trade measures in EU climate change legislation with the international obligations of the Community under the WTO, namely their compatibility with the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) 1994.

This paper examines whether the climate policy options policymakers are contemplating are compatible with core principles of the world trading system set forth in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and Appellate Body decisions. The authors argue that border measures both import restrictive measures and export subsidies contemplated in US climate bills and the climate policies of other countries stand a fair chance of being challenged in the WTO. Given the prospect of foreseeable conflicts with WTO rules, the authors suggest that key WTO members should attempt to negotiate a new code that delineates a large 'green space' for measures that are designed to limit GHG emissions both within the member country and globally. By 'green space,' the authors mean policy space for climate measures that are imposed in a manner broadly consistent with core WTO principles even if a technical violation of WTO law could occur. To encourage WTO negotiating efforts along these lines, the authors recommend a time-limited 'peace clause' to be adopted into climate legislation of major emitting countries. The peace clause would suspend the application of border measures or other extraterritorial controls for a defined period while WTO negotiations are under way.

The story of agricultural policy in Northeast Asia over the past 50 years illustrates the dramatic changes that can occur in distortions to agricultural incentives faced by producers and consumers at different stages of economic development. In this study of Japan, the Republic of Korea (the southern part of the peninsula, hereafter referred to as Korea) and the island of Taiwan, China (hereafter referred to as Taiwan), the authors estimate the degree of distortions for key agricultural products as well as for the agricultural sector as a whole over a period when these economies transitioned from low- or middle- to high-income status the beginning of the so-called East Asian economic miracle of dramatic industrial development. The three economies in terms of the nature of their economies, including their resource endowments that determined the course of their modern economic growth and development. The evolution of agricultural policies in the three economies is then reviewed before discussing how to measure distortions to agricultural incentives using the methodology from Anderson et al. (2008), the focus of which is on nominal and relative rates of assistance. Implications of empirical findings for policy reforms in the three economies are discussed in the final section, where the authors also identify lessons for later-developing economies experiencing similar structural transformations in the course of their economic growth. Statistical observations are found to be consistent with the hypothesis that the success of rapid industrialization that advanced these economies to the middle-income stage resulted in declines in agriculture's comparative advantage associated with the growing income disparity between farmers and employees in non-agricultural sectors.

Earnings from farming in many developing countries have been depressed by a pro-urban bias in own-country policies as well as by governments of richer countries favoring their farmers with import barriers and subsidies. Both sets of policies, which reduce national and global economic welfare and contribute to global inequality and poverty, have been undergoing reform since the 1980s. Using the linkage model of the global economy and modifications to the pre-release of version 7 of the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) protection database for 2004, this paper seeks to compare the effect of those reforms to date with those that would come from removing remaining agricultural and trade policies. Two sets of results are thus presented: one showing the effects of policy reforms between 1980-84 and 2004, the other showing what the removal of remaining distortions as of 2004 could be. Both sets of results indicate improvements in the real value of agricultural output and exports, the real returns to farm land and unskilled labor, and real net farm incomes in most developing country regions despite the adverse effect on the international terms of trade for some developing countries that are net food importers or are enjoying preferential access to agricultural markets of high-income countries. Landowners in those high-income countries still offering their farmers price supports could readily afford to compensate them from the benefits of removing remaining agricultural protectionism.

Agriculture in Western Europe enjoys a degree of diversity that reflects a wide variety of soils and climatic conditions ranging from the arid Mediterranean regions to the Arctic Circle. Superimposed on this natural diversity is the complexity of different social, economic and political conditions in the eighteen countries that are the subject of this chapter. History has played a major part in creating this patchwork, particularly the different paths that countries took from feudalism to independent farming units and the inheritance laws that influenced the extent to which land ownership was transmitted from generation to generation. Average farm size varies considerably in the countries of Western Europe, in turn reflecting the relative political and social importance of landowners and small farmers. By the late nineteenth century, these various factors had determined a structure of farming in the Western European region that is still visible today. Productivity growth in Western Europe's agricultural sector compared favorably with that in the manufacturing sector in the immediate post-war period. Over the period 1949 to 1959, by which time the economy had largely recovered from the war-time disruptions, output per person in agriculture had increased by more than that in manufacturing in most of the countries in Western Europe. The productivity growth was a combination of output increases as a result of mechanization and modernization, and the outflow of labor as other sectors absorbed rural workers.

Cotton is an important cash crop in many developing economies, supporting the livelihoods of millions of poor households. In some countries it contributes as much as 40 percent of merchandise exports and more than 5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). The global cotton market, however, has been subject to numerous policy interventions, to the detriment of nonsubsidized producers. This examination of the global cotton market and trade policies reaches four main conclusions. First, rich cotton-producing countries should stop supporting their cotton sectors; as an interim step, transfers to the cotton sector should be fully decoupled from current production decisions. Second, many cotton-producing (and often cotton-dependent) developing economies need to complete their unfinished reform agenda. Third, new technologies, especially genetically modified seed varieties, should be embraced by developing economies; this will entail extensive research to identify varieties appropriate to local growing conditions and the establishment of the proper legislative and regulatory framework. Finally, cotton promotion is needed to reverse or at least arrest cotton s decline as a share of total fiber consumption.