Economic research and trade policy analysis
Conclusion
Research published by the European Parliament in 2017 claimed that Blockchain could “change our lives” (Boucher, 2017). What the various blockchain applications that are being developed in areas as diverse as trade finance, trade facilitation, trade in services, intellectual property and government procurement show is that Blockchain has the potential to impact both the traders and the government agencies involved in international trade significantly. Opportunities are multifaceted, but will only be realized if several key challenges are addressed.
The WTO and the global economy: Contemporary challenges and possible responses
The high economic growth rates that have been achieved by many countries in Asia have led to a contemporary world economy that is multipolar. This has had repercussions for the WTO, as well as for other multilateral organisations. The deadlock in the WTO’s Doha Round has led the United States and the European Union increasingly to turn their attention towards the negotiation of preferential trade agreements, including so-called ‘mega-regional’ partnerships. This chapter discusses some of the implications for – and possible responses by – the economies that have the greatest stake in a well-functioning multilateral trading system. These economies may find themselves caught in the midst of disagreements between the major trading nations, with few prospects of participating in the mega-regionals. The chapter argues that these economies – including those that have acceded to the WTO since its creation – need to take a more proactive leadership role in the WTO to enhance the transparency of what is done in the ‘megaregionals’ and to facilitate the pursuit of rule-making initiatives in the WTO on a plurilateral basis.
Supply chain connectivity and trade in Asia
The term logistics is an ancient one. Historically, the military has been lauded as the key underpinning example for good logistics practices, given their emphasis on good movement practices and operational excellence. Good logistics practice can be taken to denote the set of activities undertaken to ensure the smooth passage of goods and services from one location to another, relying on supply liaison officers to provide the necessary connection between stakeholders in a convoy. Indeed, it is the very adept use of logistics (both hard and soft) that has provided certain military forces with superior competitive advantage, the result of which is well documented in history.
Foreward
Global value chains (GVCs) have been a feature of the international economic architecture for many years, but scholarly interest in the phenomenon is more recent. Today that interest is intense, emanating from an array of academic disciplines as well as from the policy world. This volume, jointly produced by the Fung Global Institute and the World Trade Organization, is an attempt to capture the core features and themes of the exploding literature on GVCs. Our review of the literature demonstrates the eclectic nature of existing work on GVCs, which in turn is a reflection of the complex character of these international production arrangements. Apart from seeking to capture the different strands of the literature, it is our hope that the volume may contribute to a deeper mutual understanding among different disciplinary perspectives, including economic, political economy, business and management, development, social, and public policy analyses.
Trade policy and natural resources
This section looks at the ways government policy responds to the unique features of natural resources. It examines how the unequal distribution of natural resources give importing and exporting countries incentives to use restrictive trade and domestic measures to “capture” monopoly rents. It analyzes how governments can use trade restrictions and domestic measures to strengthen property rights or reduce the exploitation of the natural resource. Where the consumption or extraction of a natural resource affects the environment, it considers the steps governments could take to make producers and consumers take account of the social costs of their activities. However, the use of trade and domestic policies will have consequences for trade partners through changes to their terms of trade. In some instances, the availability of large resource rents may make government policies hostage to vested interests involved in the extraction and trade of natural resources. Finally, this section will consider how regional trade cooperation can assist in mitigating or resolving these potential frictions in natural resources.
Domestic regulation: What are the costs and benefits for international trade in services?
Services have been considered non-tradable and therefore outside the scope of trade policy-making until quite recently. A logical consequence is that explicit policy barriers to cross-border trade in services are rare. What segments markets for tradable services is therefore largely in the realm of domestic regulation. Both the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and a number of regional trade agreements (RTAs) aim at developing disciplines on domestic regulation. GATS Article VI states that disciplines on qualification requirements and procedures, technical standards and licensing requirements shall be established to ensure that regulation is not more burdensome than necessary to ensure the quality of the service. Such disciplines are, however, yet to be established, but a reference paper on pro-competitive domestic regulation in telecommunications has been included in a number of World Trade Organization (WTO) members’ GATS schedules of commitments, and some RTAs have quite detailed disciplines on domestic regulation in this sector.
Introduction
No doubt, the world looks a little different today than it did at the end of 2019 when we first published the Periodic Table of DLT in Trade. A natural year’s worth of progression has been both accelerated and in some areas stunted by the forces of the COVID-19 pandemic, the widespread and long-lasting implications of which still remain unknown.
Introducción
Las subvenciones son uno de los numerosos instrumentos de política general sujetos a normas en el sistema multilateral de comercio, pero plantean cuestiones más complejas para quienes adoptan las políticas que otros muchos instrumentos sometidos a las normas de la OMC o del GATT. Uno de los motivos de ello es que las subvenciones se pueden definir de diferentes maneras. Otro es que se utilizan para conseguir objetivos muy variados. Incluso cuando no van dirigidas al comercio, pueden influir en los flujos comerciales. El presente Informe se centra esencialmente en las subvenciones que conceden una ventaja a determinados productores nacionales, por lo que afectan al comercio. La difícil tarea de determinar qué tipos de subvención plantean problemas desde el punto de vista del sistema comercial, y qué cabe hacer al respecto, ocupa un importante lugar en el programa de trabajo del sistema del GATT y la OMC.
A podium perspective: Experiences and challenges of chairing a working party
What is the perspective from the podium? what are the challenges that face the chairperson of an accession working party? The role of a chairperson of an accession working party is tough and challenging, and the functions of a chairperson can only be successfully exercised if he or she has the trust and confidence of parties involved. This role is best understood as that of a referee, assisted by the Secretariat. The accession of the Russian Federation demonstrated that, ‘the real work in WTO accession negotiations is done “beyond the gavel”. If the chair could only work with the gavel, the accession process would get nowhere.’ Critical to any progress in the complexity of accession negotiations is political will and the ability to compromise, as geopolitics may add a thick layer of complexity to the process. The reality of accession negotiations is that all participants have to be accommodated.
The WTO- Plus Obligations: Dual Class or a Strengthened System?
Obligations in accession protocols that go beyond the multilateral trade agreements are commonly referred to as ‘WTO-plus’ obligations. This chapter reviews the so-called WTO-plus obligations and argues that even though they are perceived to expand the existing obligations under multilateral trade agreements, they in fact do not create two classes of membership within the World Trade Organization (WTO). First, all accession processes are conducted on a case-by-case basis, and thus result in different obligations for each acceding government. Second, the WTO legal system is evolving continuously; therefore, to adopt new rules and advance the legal system, obligations cannot remain the same as in previous accessions. Third, non-discrimination remains one of the fundamental principles of the multilateral trading system. Accessions to WTO follow this principle and hence WTO-plus obligations have been and will continue to be set on a non-discriminatory basis. At the same time, WTO-plus obligations help upgrade the rules-based multilateral trading system. They fill gaps in the WTO rules on anti-dumping, countervailing and safeguard regimes, and they advance WTO rules by promoting plurilateral agreements.
Supply chains and offshoring
The shuffle of jobs offshore (or back onshore) has caught the attention and concerns of policy makers. The structural shifts in industrial structures are creating new winners and losers. Unskilled labour-intensive parts of the manufacturing production process have been increasingly offshored by advanced country firms to relatively unskilled labourabundant developing economies. This “offshoring” phenomenon is expected to reduce jobs for low- and semi-skilled workers in advanced economies while increasing them in developing economies. At the same time, resulting productivity increases in advanced economies can raise the demand for native workers – at least in complementary tasks. The empirical literature suggests that fears of job-losses due to offshoring in advanced economies are often exaggerated – restricted largely to the short-run. Policy makers can address these concerns through strengthening social safety nets in the short run and instituting skills-upgrading programmes to create a more flexible labour force in the long run. Greater challenges lie ahead for these policy makers, with an increasing number of services jobs being offshored from developed to developing economies. Even in developing economies, services offshoring can worsen inequality by raising skill premiums, thereby making investment in education equally crucial there. Looking ahead, given increasing wages in certain developing economies, increasing transport costs, new technologies and concerns about separating R&D from manufacturing activities, there is a possibility of a large number of manufacturing and services tasks returning to advanced economies.
Industry Wages and Tariffs ofthe Rest of the World
There is widespread evidence that countries use trade policy to protect their workers. Sector-level tariffs typically correlate positively with sector wages and employment. This chapter examines the mirror question of how tariffs of other countries of the world affect industry wages at home. To answer this question, we rely on an industry-level analysis of wages in a sample of developing and developed countries spanning from 1976 to 2004. The effect of trade policy is identified through differential exposure of trade policy changes abroad for workers in different industries.
Las normas en el sistema multilateral de comercio
La presente sección se ocupa de los textos jurídicos y la jurisprudencia pertinente de la OMC relativos a las normas. En ella se examinan en primer lugar los propios textos, para analizar después detalladamente algunos de los conceptos fundamentales pertinentes a las normas recogidos tanto en los Acuerdos OTC y MSF como en el GATT de 1994. Seguidamente se sitúan los Acuerdos en el contexto del análisis económico expuesto en las secciones anteriores y se hace también referencia a la jurisprudencia acumulada en relación con las normas. Dado que el presente informe se centra en las normas de productos, sólo se analizarán los textos jurídicos y la jurisprudencia de la OMC relativas a las “mercancías”. No obstante, es importante señalar que el Acuerdo General sobre el Comercio de Servicios (AGCS) contiene también disposiciones relativas a las normas en la esfera de los servicios, especialmente en los párrafos 4 y 5 de su artículo VI.
Openness to trade and informality
Globalization and the opening of markets in developing economies to trade is believed to have affected informal employment in these countries. This chapter summarizes the theoretical arguments for such a link and presents the relevant empirical evidence. In particular, it asks the questions: What roles do trade reforms and trade expansion play in explaining changes in the share of informal employment? How does trade opening affect the relative wage of informal, compared to formal, workers? While the long-term allocative effects of trade opening have been extensively studied by trade economists since at least the eighteenth century, the short- and medium-term impact of trade reforms on the composition of employment, the wage structure and unemployment only started to attract the attention of researchers in the early 1990s (Agénor, 1995). This chapter contains two parts. First, a summary of theoretical approaches concerning the impact of trade on informality is provided. Second, empirical studies aimed at validating different theoretical hypotheses are discussed.
Évolution du marché du travail
La présente section vise à mettre en perspective la discussion sur les effets du commerce et de la technologie sur le marché du travail. L’analyse ciblée de ces effets peut donner, à tort, l’impression que le commerce et/ou la technologie sont les principaux déterminants de l’emploi et des salaires. Toutefois, comme on le verra dans cette section, les niveaux d’emploi ou de chômage et le niveau des salaires sont largement déterminés par la façon dont fonctionne le marché du travail. Autrement dit, les effets de la technologie et du commerce sur le comportement du marché du travail dépendent, dans une large mesure, des conditions institutionnelles du marché du travail, des changements économiques concomitants et de la diversification des possibilités d’emploi lorsque des chocs se produisent.