Economic and regulatory policy implications of overlapping preferential trade agreements in the Arab countries : the case of Tunisia

Tunisia’s 'Association Agreement' with the European Union (EU) will remove trade barriers on a large variety of goods by 2008. This paper (2007) undertakes an assessment of the impact of reforms, degree of implementation, flanking measures taken by the government, and the compliance of different regional trade agreements (RTAs) signed by Tunisia with World Trade Organization (WTO). Discriminatory treatment between off-shore and on-shore enterprises as well as protection of the local market has resulted in development of an off-shore sector supplied with imported intermediary products, scarcely integrated in the Tunisian economy, and an inefficient export sector, too weak to resist foreign competition

Trade liberalization, local air pollution, and public health in Tunisia: Assessing the Ancillary Health Benefits of Pollution Abatement Policy

Since the middle of the past century, Tunisia is embarked in an ambitious trade reform program aiming to improve its integration in the world economy, boost growth through valorising comparative advantages, and reduce unemployment among its population. However, and despite the positive role that trade may plays in improving growth through better allocation of domestic resources and lower costs of imported equipments and raw materials, the risk is to amplify output in sectors intensive in energy in a country where energy still subsidized. Introducing pollution abatement tax has been suggested as a way to achieve ancillary benefits from reduced local air toxics. The highest level of local air pollution is found in heavily populated cities where labor is concentrated and where labor health is believed to have been significantly impacted. The objective of this paper is to address this important issue. It identifies the optimal and “no regrets” pollution abatement tax on a net welfare function, which integrates both net health benefits and adjustment costs. The paper uses a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model for the assessment that allows the health benefits to feedback into the economy. A health effects sub-model takes the local air emissions output from the CGE model and assesses the implications for ambient air concentration levels and health effects. The results suggest an “optimal” abatement rate in 2020 of around 25% of CO2 reduction compared with the baseline 2020 emissions. However, the most significant impact concerns the relatively small aggregate cost of pollution abatement in terms of forgone real average growth rate of GDP between 2010 and 2020 for the trade scenario with “optimal” climate policy. Finally, the major consequence of pollution abatement policies is the reduction of production generated by polluting activities against a higher production of less polluting activities

North African Countries and Agricultural Trade Liberalization Under the Doha Round: Does a Top-Down Analysis Matters?

The countries of North Africa are characterized by a relatively high contribution of agriculture sector in their economies. At the same time, all the countries in the region are net agricultural importers. In this context, any potential agreement on agricultural trade liberalization under the Doha Round multilateral negotiations will raises world agricultural prices and could adversely affect the region. Although there are numerous studies on the impact of multilateral agricultural trade liberalization on North African countries, few studies have examined the impact of these global changes on the agricultural sector and on income distribution. Moreover, all the past studies use either global or country CGE models. This study attempts to address this gap in the literature. First, it combines the advantages of global and country models by linking the MIRAGE model to two countries dynamic CGE models built specially for this study. Second, we examine the distributional impact of agricultural trade liberalization in the two countries by integrating individually various household categories in both models. Our results show that drawing policy implications from global models for a specific country is completely misleading. In fact, while the results of the global model show that Tunisia will be winner and Morocco a loser from agricultural trade liberalization, the country models show a completely different picture. For both countries, results show that while the macroeconomic effects are relatively modest, all categories of households lose