DISCUSSION: AGRICULTURAL POLICIES, TRADE AGREEMENTS AND DISPUTE SETTLEMENT

Agricultural and Food Policy, International Relations/Trade,

Rethinking International Subsidy Rules. Bertelsmann Working Paper 28/02/2020

Geo-economic tensions and global collective action problems call for international cooperation to revise and de-velop rules to guide both the use of domestic subsidies and responses by governments to cross-border competition spillover effects. Current WTO rules that divide all subsidies into either prohibited or actionable cate-gories are no longer fit for purpose. Piecemeal efforts in preferential trade agreements and bi- or trilateral configurations offer a basis on which to build, but are too narrow in scope and focus. Addressing the spillover ef-fects of subsidies could start with launching a work program at the 12th Ministerial Conference of the WTO to mobilize an epistemic community concerned with subsidy policies, tasked with building a more solid evidence base on the magnitude, purpose and effects of subsidy policies

Spillovers, Subsidies and Multilateral Cooperation Addressing Concerns Over Industrial Subsidies. Bertelsmann Working Paper 29/02/2020

Negative international spillovers created by nontariff policies are a rising source of trade tensions and conflicts. The WTO does not include rules for subsidies for services industries, state-owned enterprises or investment in-centives. Existing disciplines on industrial policies are increasingly seen to be inadequate by many WTO members. Efforts to revisit and expand rules for contested policies must recognize the changing nature of international production. A first step in addressing trade conflicts associated with industrial policies is to determine where negative international competition spillovers are both large and systemic in nature. Doing so requires going be-yond trade ministries and bringing in finance and line ministries, as well as competition agencies and international organizations with expertise in collecting information on subsidies and analyzing their effects

MAKING THE SPECIAL AND DIFFERENTIAL PROVISIONS OF WTO AGREEMENTS EFFECTIVE FOR THE LEAST DEVELOPED COUNTRIES: PERSPECTIVES FROM BANGLADESH

The paper examines the various aspects of the Special and Differential (S&D) Measures of the WTO and argues that the LDCs can be integrated effectively into the world trading system on a fair and equitable basis through strengthening S&D measures in favour of them. As an active member of the LDCs, Bangladesh is interested in the S&DT and its impact on Bangladesh economy.WTO Agreements, LDCs, Special and Differential Treatment, S&D, Bangladesh

NATIONAL ADMINISTERED PROTECTION AGENCIES: THEIR ROLE IN THE POST-URUGUAY ROUND WORLD

This paper reviews the role of national administered protection agencies, whose responsibility is the enforcement of national trade remedy laws. After reviewing four recent trade remedy cases we argue that the role of the national administered protection agencies should be changed. Given the additional responsibilities the WTO has assumed in administering the Agreement on Agriculture, the growth of regional integration agreements and the increasing use of anti-dumping and countervailing duty actions against fairly traded imports, we argue that all trade actions should be taken to the WTO for settlement. The role of the national administered protection agencies should be changed to make them agents for trade liberalization. This would involve them taking on three primary functions: 1) as transparency agents; 2) as investigatory agents; and 3) as advocacy agents.International Relations/Trade,

An Actionable Knowledge Representation for Popular Fundamental Investment Strategies

Individual investors consistently underperform relevant investment benchmarks. Consequently, a considerable body of literature of fundamental investment strategies targeted towards this audience emerged. Several online platforms provide operationalizations of these strategies in the form of stock screeners. However, each platform must use its own interpretation of the strategy as no central knowledge repository exists. Arguing that ontologies standardize the concepts relevant to a domain and enable knowledge sharing among domain users, this paper seeks to explore that viability of an ontology as a knowledge representation method to represent fundamental investment strategies. Our efforts herein go beyond representing the concepts and inter-concept relationships that are descriptive of fundamental investment strategies, as we also demonstrate that ontologies using SWRL rules can deploy these strategies as stock pickers (also referred to as stock screening). We use the CANSLIM strategy as a case, modeling and executing it on simulated data using our ontology and SWRL

National Administered Protection Agencies: Their Role in the Post-Uruguay Round World

International Relations/Trade,