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В декабре 2022 г. был опубликован доклад третейской группы по спору Индонезия – Сырьевые материалы. Спор инициирован по жалобе ЕС. Этот доклад интересен во многих аспектах, включая процесс добычи и экономическое значение никеля для экономики ответчика, толкования Статьи XI:2(a) и Статьи XX(d) ГАТТ 1994. По результатам разбирательства меры Индонезии в отношении экспорта никелевой руды были признаны незаконными и не подпадающими ни под охват изъятий из общего запрета применения количественных ограничений, ни под общие исключения из обязательств. В настоящей статье анализируются аргументы истца и ответчика, сделанные третейской группой толкования и выводы. Доклад третейской группы по спору Индонезия – Сырьевые материалы оставил открытыми множество вопросов. Например, вывод, что промышленное сырье не может иметь для экономики страны существенного значения, если его использование только планируется для создания новой отрасли (в данном случае – аккумуляторов для электромобилей). Из этого фактически следует, что разрыв между странами, которые уже успешно производят электромобили и теми, кто только планирует это делать, должен увеличиваться. Индонезия обжаловала решение третейской группы. Сложно предугадать, будет ли когда-либо у Апелляционного органа возможность дать свою оценку. В любом случае совершенно ясно, что сомнительные трактовки правил ВТО создают для организации дополнительные системные риски. Равно как и заставляют призадуматься об объективности разрешения торговых споров., The WTO panel released its report on Indonesia (Raw Materials dispute) in December 2022. The dispute case was launched by the EU. Th is report is interesting in many respects, including such issues as production processes, the importance of nickel for the defendant’s economy, and interpretations of Articles XI:2(a) and XX(d) of the GATT 1994. Pursuant to the proceedings, Indonesia’s measures with respect to the exports of nickel ore were found as illegal and falling neither within the scope of exceptions to the quantitative restrictions, nor the exceptions to the processing obligations. The article analyzes the arguments of the parties, and the interpretations and conclusions made by the panel. The report of the panel raises many questions. For example, the conclusion that an industrial commodity can not be of essential importance for defendant’s economy if its use is only planned to create a new industry (in this case, batteries for electric vehicles). Consequently, de facto, the gap between the countries that are already engaged in successful production of electric cars and those who only plan to do this should increase. Indonesia has appealed this decision. It is hard to predict whether the Appellate Body will ever have the opportunity to give its assessment. In any case, it is quite clear that questionable interpretations of the WTO rules create additional systemic risks for the organization. As well as they make one ponder over the objectivity of trade dispute resolution.

High food prices have undermined Indonesia's effort to reduce poverty and improve health and nutrition indicators. It is estimated that for every 1% increase in price, the national poverty headcount rises by 1%. A significant contributor to high food prices is the prevalence of non-tariff measures (NTM) in the international trade of food and agriculture products. Some assessments have been made and they showed how the removal of non-tariff measures on food and agricultural goods would support poverty reduction and nutritional improvement. Removing non-tariff measures on rice and meat, for example, could lead to an overall reduction in poverty rate of 2.8 percent percentage points. Two moves could be considered to gain the most significant benefits from the removal of non-tariff measures: the removal of quotas and the application of automatic import licensing. The liberalisation of food trade must also be accompanied by heightened competition among importers, system improvements to facilitate import processes, and innovative agriculture policies to boost the competitiveness of domestic producers.

In Scotch Whisky Association, the Court of Justice held that a minimum unit pricing mechanism on alcoholic drinks constituted a measure equivalent to a quantitative restriction under Art. 34 TFEU, because it prevents the lower cost price of imported products being reflected in the selling price to the consumer, and therefore hinders market access. Both, the Advocate General and the Court, used this judgment to introduce some remarkable insights particularly on the future of the market access formula, the relationship of the Common Agricultural Policy to the freedom of goods and how national courts need to make recourse to scientific evidence when applying the proportionality test.

Tariff modernization will help Bangladesh diversify its export basket. Tariff modernization is at the crux of input competitiveness for efficient manufacturing given that more than 90 percent of the raw material for exportable goods are imported in Bangladesh and the other export incentives like bonded warehouse facilities are not accessible to firms other than Ready Made Garments and a few deemed exporters. Duty drawback system is also designed to discourage traders from claiming it in the first place and cash incentives can only be used as a temporary measure.

В статье рассмотрена динамика внешней торговли Республики Корея и Российской Федерации. Проанализированы основные направления таможенно-тарифного и нетарифного регулирования внешнеэкономической деятельности данных стран. На основе анализа приведена сравнительная характеристика, выделены сходства и различия к подходу формирования таможенно-тарифного и нетарифного регулирования ВЭД. The article presents results of the dynamicsof foreign trade between Republic of Korea and Russian Federation. Analyzed the main directions of customs tariff and non-tariff regulation of foreign economic activity (FEA) of these countries. Based on the analysis compiled a comparative characteristics and ident ified the similarities and differences of the approach to the formation of customs tariff and non-tariff regulation of FEA.

In Scotch Whisky Association, the Court of Justice held that a minimum unit pricing mechanism on alcoholic drinks constituted a measure equivalent to a quantitative restriction under Art. 34 TFEU, because it prevents the lower cost price of imported products being reflected in the selling price to the consumer, and therefore hinders market access. Both, the Advocate General and the Court, used this judgment to introduce some remarkable insights particularly on the future of the market access formula, the relationship of the Common Agricultural Policy to the freedom of goods and how national courts need to make recourse to scientific evidence when applying the proportionality test.

This paper surveys empirically the broad features of trade policy in goods for 31 major economies that collectively represented 83 percent of the world's population and 91 percent of the world's GDP in 2013. It addresses the following five questions: Do some countries have more liberal trading regimes than others? Within countries, which industries receive the most import protection? How do trade policies change over time? Do countries discriminate among their trading partners when setting trade policy? Finally, how liberalized is world trade? The analysis documents the extent of cross-sectional heterogeneity in applied commercial policy across countries, their economic sectors, and their trading partners, over time. It concludes that substantial trade policy barriers remain as an important feature of the world economy.

How do global supply chain linkages modify countries' incentives to impose import protection? Are these linkages empirically important determinants of trade policy? To address these questions, this paper introduces supply chain linkages into a workhorse terms-of-trade model of trade policy with political economy. Theory predicts that discretionary final goods tariffs will be decreasing in the domestic content of foreign-produced final goods. Provided foreign political interests are not too strong, final goods tariffs will also be decreasing in the foreign content of domestically-produced final goods. The paper tests these predictions using newly assembled data on bilateral applied tariffs, temporary trade barriers, and value-added contents for 14 major economies over the 1995-2009 period. There is strong support for the empirical predictions of the model. The results imply that global supply chains matter for trade policy, both in principle and in practice.

This background paper provides information on the study of the Group of 20 (G-20) and challenges faced by low-income developing countries (LIDCs). The study analyzes LIDCs development challenges and how G-20 economic policies can be coordinated so they can contribute to creating an enabling environment for their development. The focus of the paper is the role that trade and investment policies of G-20 countries play in this context. The paper is composed of three parts 1) the characteristics of LIDCs integration in the world economy, 2) the evolution of G-20 policies that affect LIDCs integration, and 3) the potential for changes in the G-20 trade and investment policy landscape to benefit LIDCs.

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.

This paper examines the welfare effect of foreign investment under quantitative restrictions for a host country with a cash-in-advance constraint. This constraint results in a divergence between the consumer virtual prices and the world prices. If the cash required for purchasing exportable goods exceeds that of the importable, additional foreign investment can widen the price divergence and, thus, reduce welfare. This result is contrary to the conventional view that foreign investment is non-immiserizing under quantitative restrictions. On the other hand, if the cash requirement is larger for buying importable goods, foreign investment can still promote welfare.

Da bi se v EU dosegel prost pretok blaga, je EU sprejela pravne norme, ki zajemajo: - prepoved uvoznih in izvoznih carin ter dajatev z enakim učinkom med državami članicami, - prepoved količinskih omejitev pri uvozu in izvozu ter ukrepov z enakim učinkom med državami članicami, - prepoved neposredne ali posredne diskriminacije davčne obravnave izdelkov, uvoženih iz drugih držav članic, v primerjavi z istovrstnimi domačimi izdelki in - prepoved uvajanja notranjih davkov na izdelke drugih držav članic, s katerimi bi država članica posredno zaščitila druge izdelke. Ker imajo države članice še vedno dokaj proste roke pri ureditvi davkov, imajo tudi različne davčne stopnje, kar vpliva na gospodarske subjekte, na to kje bodo poslovali in seveda tudi na predmet njihovega poslovanja. EU se zavzema za harmonizacijo davčnih pravnih norm in je doslej še najbolj harmonizirala DDV, kjer se bojuje proti davčnim utajam in poizkuša harmonizirati stopnje davka na dodano vrednost. Vpliv pravih norm, ki nediskriminatorno obravnavajo tako domače kot tuje gospodarske subjekte (gospodarske subjekte iz drugih držav članic) je pozitiven in vpliva resnično na njihovo prosto trgovanje, torej na prost pretok blaga. Na drugi strani pa je vpliv diskriminatornih pravnih norm na gospodarske subjekte bodisi pozitiven bodisi negativen, odvisno za kateri gospodarski subjekt gre. Prav zaradi tega pa se EU zavzema za minimalizacijo diskriminatornih pravil, da bi se tako čimbolj dosegel prost pretok blaga. In order to guarantee a free movement of goods, the European Union has introduced a set of legal norms, which encompass the following: - the prohibition of customs duties on imports and exports and of all charges having an equivalent effect between Member States, - the prohibition of quantitative restrictions on imports and exports, as well as all measures having equivalent effect between Member States, - the prohibition of any direct or indirect internal taxation issued by any Member State on the products of other Member States in excess of that imposed directly or indirectly on similar domestic products and - the prohibition of any internal taxation (by any Member State) of such a nature as to afford indirect protection to other products. Since Member States are still relatively free in their tax regulation (t.e. in determining their fiscal policy), this reflects in their tax rates being fairly different from one Member State to another, which influences the business entities (as to where they will make business, as well as the very subject of their business). The European Union has been trying to endorse the harmonization of tax legal norms and has so far been most successful in the harmonization of the VAT, thus fighting tax evasion, and it has been trying to harmonize VAT rates. The effects of legal norms which influence in a non-discriminatory way the functioning of business entities home and abroad (i.e. in other Member States), can fairly be regarded as positive, since they really boost free trade, i.e. a free movement of goods among Member States. On the other hand, the influence of the discriminatory legal norms upon business entities can be seen as positive or negative, depending on the very sort of each individual business entity. This is exactly why the European Union has been trying to endorse the minimalisation of the discriminatory rules, in order to guarantee a free movement of goods.

The Doha round of multilateral trade negotiations stalled in 2008 owing in no small degree to a lack of agreement on the terms of substantially reducing trade-distorting support for agricultural products and to what extent this will be beneficial to developing countries. Nicaragua presents an interesting case in point, being one of the poorest economies in Latin America with still a relatively large agricultural sector and high degrees of rural poverty. In 2005, the country signed a free trade agreement with the United States. This chapter provides a quantitative analysis addressing that question. It does so using a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model for Nicaragua coupled with a micro-simulation methodology. The first section provides background information on trade reform policies and macroeconomic trends in Nicaragua, with special reference to the agricultural sector and rural poverty. The section that follows describes the main features of the CGE model and the micro-simulation methodology used to assess the impact on poverty and inequality. The author then lay out the model scenarios considered, which include liberalizations of agricultural and all merchandise goods trade by the rest of the world and by Nicaragua itself. That is followed by a summary analysis of results. This analysis includes tests for the sensitivity of the results with respect to assumptions regarding the responsiveness of trade to price liberalization, as identified through the relevant trade elasticities. The final section provides conclusions and possible policy implications.

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.

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.

The goal of this thesis is to describe the most important trade policy instruments that have been used in international trade in textiles since the second half of the 20th century, and to deduce the implications of the instruments on the textile sector, mainly the European one. The thesis introduces the classification of instruments in the trade policy used in the international trade in textiles and economic consequences of chosen instruments; brief characteristics of evolution of international trade in textiles since the second half of the 20th century, change in localization and sector structure of the textiles and clothing industry and main trends in its evolution. There are described most important multilateral agreements concerning the trade in textiles: Short-Term Arrangement regarding International Trade in Cotton Textiles, Long-Term Arrangement regarding International Trade in Cotton Textiles, Multifibre Arrangement, Agreement on Textiles and Clothing and current trends in contractual instruments followed by autonomous instruments such as anti-dumping and anti-subsidy measures and particular cases. The thesis includes consequences of the instruments mentioned above. In the last chapter, the trends in the evolution of instruments are summarized and the reflection on possible solutions for the European, and thus also Czech textile and clothing industry, is mentioned.

The effective market access granted to textiles and apparel under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is estimated, taking into account the presence of rules of origin. First, estimates are provided of the effect of tariff preferences combined with rules of origin on the border prices of Mexican final goods exported to the United States (U.S.) and of U.S. intermediate goods exported to Mexico, based on eight-digit harmonized system tariff-line data. A third of the estimated rise in the border price of Mexican apparel products is found to compensate for the cost of complying with NAFTA's rules of origin, and NAFTA is found to have raised the price of U.S. intermediate goods exported to Mexico by around 12 percent, with downstream rules of origin accounting for a third of that increase. Second, simulations are used to estimate welfare gains for Mexican exporters from preferential market access under NAFTA. The presence of rules of origin is found to approximately halve these gains.

The 1996 Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture was a step toward free trade. The Agreement lifts bans and quotas on imports, but allows their conversion into tariff-rate quotas (TRQs), which function like quotas. At present, many of the 1,300 TRQs increased market access to imports, but some have preserved pre-Agreement levels of protection. The World Trade Organization's intent as to the administration of TRQs is open to interpretation. This report analyzes seven administrative methods in light of the principle of nondiscrimination. We conclude that auctions are the best way to administer a TRQ. First-come, first-served and license-on-demand methods present a moderate risk of biased trade. State trading organizations and producer groups that directly administer TRQs can also bias trade. Historical allocation is the method most likely to be discriminatory. Two case studies illustrate our conclusion.

The aim of this contribution is to examine how the French and the German positions on agricultural policy have developed since the foundation of the EEC and what the driving forces were behind. The “general consensus” underlying the EEC treaty, and according to which the common market would be “conquered” by France in the case of the classical agricultural products, could not be translated into practice; for what emerged for these products was not a customs union but a “price support union”. As a consequence French intra-community agricultural exports had to be redirected to the world market. Thus initial positive French income transfers via intracommunity trade were transformed into transfers from the EC budget, an evolution that can be interpreted as a “modification of the general consensus”. However, this was not to last long either since the policy of price support, plus the unlimited obligation for the state to purchase any production surpluses, were bound to cause increasing budget costs and an aggravation of international trade conflicts. The fact that in the ensuing discussions on the CAP France favored price cuts while the Federal Republic pleaded for quantitative restrictions, is explained with the help of a partial analysis model. Moreover, the article also explains further divergences between the French and the German agricultural policy positions. In so doing, account is also taken of (a) the modifications of the German positions after reunification and (b) the new accents that have appeared in French agricultural policy after the change in government in 1997.

I evaluate India's transition from an inward-oriented development strategy to greater participation in the world economy. While tariff rates have decreased significantly over the past decade, India is still one of the more autarkic countries. Despite improvement over the past in export performance, India continues to lag behind its South- and East Asian neighbors. Second, official debt flows have been largely replaced by foreign direct investment (FDI) and portfolio investment in the 1990s. India's ability to attract FDI would be greatly enhanced by further reforms. I argue that India's participation in a future round of multilateral trade negotiations would benefit India. I outline the further reforms most needed: reform of labour and bankruptcy laws, real privatization, and fiscal consolidation. These involve taking on entrenched vested interests, including political parties and governments in states. Enacting them requires political courage and risk taking which in India, as in most societies, are rare.

We present a simple computable model of EC footwear production and trade coupled with a rudimentary production model for Eastern Europe. We simulate the liberalization of EC footwear imports from Eastern Europe as planned under the so-called Europe Agreements. We find that if Eastern Europe can improve its productivity modestly both East and West can gain significantly from liberalization. These gains are concentrated on the EC-North, however, while the major footwear producing areas of the EC lose. The benefits of liberalization to Eastern Europe do not depend strongly on their gaining preferential access to the EC -- they persist even if all suppliers to the EC have free access.

The authors introduce a new measure, the Trade Restrictiveness Index, to measure the restrictiveness of a system of trade protection. They propose an alternative to the commonly used ad hoc indexes of trade restrictiveness, such as the trade-weighted average tariff. That measure has no welfare-theoretic basis and can be highly misleading, in practice. For example, the complete exclusion of trade in a commodity would usually lower the index, because its trade weight would fall to zero. The authors show that their proposed index is soundly based in standard welfare economics. When trade is restricted by tariffs only, the Trade Restrictiveness Index equals the uniform tariff, which would be equivalent to the existing system of tariffs in the sense of yielding the same level of aggregate welfare. But tariffs have declined in importance in recent years as a means of restricting trade, so the measure must also be able to take account of quantitative restrictions on trade. Where quotas are the only form of restriction, this is easy: the Index equals the equiproportionate reduction in permitted import volumes that is welfare-equivalent to the initial structure of quotas. When both quotas and tariffs are present, the Index can be defined as the uniform tariff factor (one plus the uniform tariff) and uniform import reduction factor which would yield the same level of welfare as the initial system of trade restrictions. The authors show how this can be formulated, noting that if a single good is subject to both a binding quota and a tariff, it should be viewed as quota-constrained - the tariff serves merely to ensure that some of the rents accrue to the importing country. These theoretical derivations permit a major synthesis of the theory of protection and suggest how the results of computable general equilibrium models might be presented to make them internationally and intertemporally comparable. But in most cases such a model is not available and, even if it were, it would not be sufficiently disaggregated to deal with a complicated system of trade protection. So the authors present some empirical short-cuts that can be adopted for estimating changes in the Index. Chief among these is the assumption that the goods under consideration are separable from others in an appropriate general-equilibrium sense. This can provide a rigorous foundation for a form of partial-equilibrium analysis (the consideration of a subset of markets in an economy). They also show how the Trade Restrictiveness Index can be adapted to allow for different forms of rent sharing and for a country's ability to influence its terms of trade. Applying these empirical methods to exports of textiles and apparel from Hong Kong to the United States, the authors find that the protective system becomes more restrictive for both countries over the seven years considered (1982-88). Increased trade restrictiveness does not necessarily mean that quotas have been tightened. When there is economic growth, constant or even rising import quotas might still amount to a tightening of protection. Results based on the trade-weighted average of "tariff equivalents" (the gaps between Hong Kong and U.S. prices) diverge significantly from those of the Trade Restrictiveness Index. The two measures have opposite implications for the change in trade restrictiveness for two-thirds of the observations.

The imposition of a quantitative restriction on imports implies that someone somewhere is quantity-rationed. If prices rise to cut demand back to the constraint level, suppliers are rationed; if not, demanders are. In this paper we develop techniques for identifying if and when consumers are rationed and for taking account of rationing in the estimation of demand equations and in the calculation of welfare effects. By way of example we consider the effects of the various non-tariff barriers that have affected imports of different types of footwear from certain suppliers into the UK. We estimate simple CES demand systems for four types of footwear, identifying in each case the principal suppliers. Our results reveal several cases in which import restrictions on footwear led to rationing and suggest that even if prices did not rise to clear the market, the welfare losses to UK consumers of being limited in their purchases of footwear were as high as 53m pounds sterling in 1986.