Trade Friction, Dispute Settlement and Structural Adjustment, Or, Why Canada-Wheat Doesn’t Matter in North American Trade Relations

This article examines the substance of the WTO panel decision for Canada-Wheat as it relates to trade friction in North American agricultural markets. I provide an overview of recent economic literature on state trading enterprises (STEs) and examine the WTO’s approach to regulating the behaviour of STEs. The Canada-Wheat panel was the first WTO panel to consider Canada’s single-desk marketing system for Western Canadian wheat and barley and was the first test of the WTO’s regulation of STEs under GATT Article XVII. The panel rejected the American argument, opting for a line of reasoning that highlights the rules of non-discrimination while maintaining some of the ambiguity of Article XVII. I conclude by examining the competitive pressures that exacerbate trade frictions between North American wheat producers. From a legal perspective, this panel decision is significant because it clarifies the WTO’s position on STEs, to a certain extent. In the context of continental politics, however, the ruling will likely have little impact on Canada/U.S. trade relations because it must be analyzed in relation to the domestic demands that arise from ongoing structural adjustment in both nations’ agricultural sectors.agricultural exports, Canadian Wheat Board, dispute settlement, state trading enterprises, World Trade Organization, Agribusiness, Agricultural and Food Policy, Crop Production/Industries, International Relations/Trade, Political Economy,

Contingent Protection Measures and the Management of the Softwood Lumber Trade in North America

This article examines CanadaÂ’s softwood lumber dispute with the United States in the context of new juridical models of international dispute settlement and an evolving trade policy environment in North America. Two questions are of central importance to this study. First, what does the rise of contingent protection measures mean for CanadaÂ’s regulatory model? Strong antidumping legislation has created a new order of trade conflict at a time when intrasectoral competition has increased state support in a number of sectors. Second, how do American antidumping trade remedy measures come to bear in this dispute? In the softwood case, dispute settlement has been less effective because Canada, as the smaller economy, faces the challenge of enforcing panel decisions when the respondent has the power to avoid compliance.Antidumping, countervailing duties, dispute settlement, softwood, trade policy, WTO, International Relations/Trade,

The global cultural commons after Cancun: identity, diversity and citizenship

The cultural politics of global trade is a new and unexplored terrain because the public domain of culture has long been associated with national sovereignty. States everywhere have invested heavily in national identity. But in an age of globalization, culture and sovereignty have become more complex propositions, subject to global pressures and national constraints. This paper argues three main points. First, new information technologies increasingly destabilize traditional private sector models for disseminating culture. At the same time, international legal rules have become more restrictive with respect to investment and national treatment, two areas at the heart of cultural policy. Second, Doha has significant implications for the future of the cultural commons. Ongoing negotiations around TRIPS, TRIMS, GATS and dispute settlement will impose new restrictions on public authorities who wish to appropriate culture for a variety of public and private ends. Finally, there is a growing backlash against the WTO’s trade agenda for broadening and deepening disciplines in these areas. These issues have become highly politicized and fractious, and are bound to vex future rounds as the global south, led by Brazil, India and China flexes its diplomatic muscle

A viscosity framework for computing Pogorelov solutions of the Monge-Ampere equation

We consider the Monge-Kantorovich optimal transportation problem between two measures, one of which is a weighted sum of Diracs. This problem is traditionally solved using expensive geometric methods. It can also be reformulated as an elliptic partial differential equation known as the Monge-Ampere equation. However, existing numerical methods for this non-linear PDE require the measures to have finite density. We introduce a new formulation that couples the viscosity and Aleksandrov solution definitions and show that it is equivalent to the original problem. Moreover, we describe a local reformulation of the subgradient measure at the Diracs, which makes use of one-sided directional derivatives. This leads to a consistent, monotone discretisation of the equation. Computational results demonstrate the correctness of this scheme when methods designed for conventional viscosity solutions fail