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To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9701.2008.01112.x Byline: Scott McDonald (1), Terrie Walmsley (2) Abstract: The EU has indicated that after 2008 its trade relationships with developing countries will be dominated by the development of preferential trade agreements. Although not a consequence of the Cotonou Agreement, the free trade agreement between the EU and the Republic of South Africa (EU RSA FTA) was clearly one of the first fruits of this approach to trade relationships. However, there is no evidence that the design of the EU RSA FTA incorporated a comprehensive general equilibrium evaluation of the agreement for either the signatories or the other southern African nations. The analyses reported here indicate that while the EU RSA FTA may substantially benefit the signatories, there are appreciable negative impacts for other states, especially the Republic of South Africa's immediate neighbours. Moreover, the analyses indicate that the structural adjustments for African economies signalled by the FTA are substantial, which implies that there will be substantial economic costs associated with the FTA. Author Affiliation: (1)Oxford Brookes University and (2)Purdue University

The industrialized and newly industrializing economies (NIEs) in East Asia will benefit from China's WTO accession, and the developing economies in the region may incur small welfare losses. China will increase its demand for high-end manufacturing products from Japan and the NIEs and farm products, natural resources, and manufactured goods from developing East Asia. New foreign investment may flow into these expanding sectors. The overall impact on foreign investment is likely to be positive in the NIEs but negative in developing East Asia. The NIEs may face heightened competition in global markets as China's comparative advantage shifts into high-end products. (JEL F11, F13, F15), I. INTRODUCTION China's WTO accession will have major implications for China and present both opportunities and challenges for the East Asian economies. A number of factors highlight the importance of [...]

The issues, difficulties and routes to liberalizing the movement of medium and low skilled service providers between developing and developed countries are discussed.

China's joining the World Trade Organization has given rise to concerns about competition, trade deficits, trade liberalization, policy changes and effects on international markets.

We estimate the macroeconomic impacts of mandatory business closures in the U.S. and many other countries in order to control the spread of the COVID-19. The analysis is based on the application of a modified version of the GTAP model. We simulate mandatory closures in all countries or parts of countries that had imposed them as of 7 April for three-month and six-month cases. For the three-month scenario, we estimate a 20.3% decline of U.S. GDP on an annual basis, or $4.3 trillion. The employment decline of 22.4% in the U.S. for the three-month closure represents 35.2 million workers for that period. If the mandatory closures are extended to six months because of a second wave, these negative impacts would slightly more than double. The employment impacts are slightly greater in percentage terms than the GDP impacts because most service sectors, which are generally more labour-intensive, are more negatively impacted by the closures than are 'essential' sectors. Our results should be considered upper-bound estimates given such assumptions as businesses laying off workers no longer paying them wages or salaries. Note also that the article examines the mandatory closures alone and does not factor in any countervailing fiscal or monetary policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging issues facing open economies, including global value chains and non‐tariff measures, have important implications for demand that are often not well suited for analysis with the supply‐side mechanisms commonly found in economic models – namely taxes and productivity. The aim of this paper is to provide a methodological approach for implementing demand‐side changes. Specifically, the approach adapts the Armington equation to model a change in consumers' willingness to pay for imports. To illustrate, we estimate the impacts of the World Trade Organization's Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA). Estimated ad valorem equivalents of the TFA are applied as demand‐side shocks to consumers' willingness to pay in a global applied general equilibrium model and the results compared to those obtained using Samuelson's iceberg approach. We find that the iceberg approach results in a technical change which increases the productivity of imports, raising real GDP, while the willingness‐to‐pay approach causes a smaller rise in real GDP, although trade increases further. The impact on the terms of trade differs significantly between the two mechanisms, with prices falling as costs fall, under the iceberg method, and rising with increased willingness to pay. Our results clearly show that the choice of mechanism matters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]