Potential gains from reducing trade barriers in manufacturing, services and agriculture

Trade barriers

A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE ON REGIONAL INTEGRATION IN NORTH AMERICA

International Relations/Trade,

A Survey of Findings on the Poverty Impacts of Agricultural Trade Liberalization

The purpose of this survey is to review the available empirical evidence on the impacts of agricultural trade liberalization on poverty – considering both the impact of domestic and international liberalization. Since trade liberalization is generally an economywide phenomenon, with tariff cuts occurring across a wide range of commodities, we do not restrict ourselves to episodes where only agricultural trade was liberalized, although emphasis in this survey is given to agricultural trade policies. Furthermore, given the difficulty of isolating the effects of trade policies alone, we will also consider the impact of other types of external shocks which have the effect of changing the relative prices of tradeable and non-tradeable goods. By examining the way in which households adjust to such external shocks, we can learn a great deal about how they would respond to sharp reductions in tariffs, or significant changes in a country’s international terms of trade engendered by multilateral trade liberalization.Poverty, rural development, agriculture, Food Security and Poverty, International Relations/Trade,

Labor market distortions, rural-urban inequality, and the opening of China's economy

The authors evaluate the impact of two key factor market distortions in China on rural-urban inequality and income distribution. They find that creation of a fully functioning land market has a significant impact on rural-urban inequality. This reform permits agricultural households to focus solely on the differential between farm and non-farm returns to labor in determining whether to work on or off-farm. This gives rise to an additional 10 million people moving out of agriculture by 2007 and lends a significant boost to the incomes of those remaining in agriculture. This off-farm migration also contributes to a significant rise in rural-urban migration, thereby lowering urban wages, particularly for unskilled workers. As a consequence, rural-urban inequality declines significantly. The authors find that reform of the Hukou system has the most significant impact on aggregate economic activity, as well as income distribution. Whereas the land market reform primarily benefits the agricultural households, this reform's primary beneficiaries are the rural households currently sending temporary migrants to the city. By reducing the implicit tax on temporary migrants, Hukou reform boosts their welfare and contributes to increased rural-urban migration. The combined effect of both factor market reforms is to reduce the urban-rural income ratio dramatically, from 2.59 in 2007 under the authors'baseline scenario to 2.27. When viewed as a combined policy package, along with WTO accession, rather than increasing inequality in China, the combined impact of product and factor market reforms significantly reduces rural-urban income inequality. This is an important outcome in an economy currently experiencing historic levels of rural-urban inequality.Labor Policies,National Urban Development Policies&Strategies,Urban Housing and Land Settlements,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Banks&Banking Reform,Economic Theory&Research,Urban Housing and Land Settlements,National Urban Development Policies&Strategies

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks as Generic Feature Extractors

Recognizing objects in natural images is an intricate problem involving multiple conflicting objectives. Deep convolutional neural networks, trained on large datasets, achieve convincing results and are currently the state-of-the-art approach for this task. However, the long time needed to train such deep networks is a major drawback. We tackled this problem by reusing a previously trained network. For this purpose, we first trained a deep convolutional network on the ILSVRC2012 dataset. We then maintained the learned convolution kernels and only retrained the classification part on different datasets. Using this approach, we achieved an accuracy of 67.68 % on CIFAR-100, compared to the previous state-of-the-art result of 65.43 %. Furthermore, our findings indicate that convolutional networks are able to learn generic feature extractors that can be used for different tasks.Comment: 4 pages, accepted version for publication in Proceedings of the IEEE International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), July 2015, Killarney, Irelan

Economic and Poverty Impacts of Agricultural, Trade and Factor Market Reforms in China

Capitalizing on the most recent estimates of agricultural price distortions in China and in other countries, this paper assesses the economic and poverty impact of global and domestic trade reform in China. It also examines the interplay between the trade reforms and factor market reforms aimed at improving the allocation of labor within the Chinese economy. The results suggest that trade reforms in the rest of the world, land reform and hukou reform all serve to reduce poverty, while unilateral trade reforms result in a small poverty increase. Agricultural distortions are important factors in determining the distributional and poverty effects of trade reform packages, although their impacts on aggregate trade and welfare appear to be small. A comprehensive reform package which bundles the reforms in commodity and factor markets together may benefit all broad household groups in China.Distorted incentives, agricultural and trade policy reforms, national agricultural development, Agricultural and Food Policy, International Relations/Trade, F13, F14, Q17, Q18,

Poverty Vulnerability and Trade Policy: Are the Likely Impacts Discernable?

Trade policy reform prospects have generated debate about the impacts on poverty. Some critics assert that price changes induced by trade reform are minimal and may not be distinguishable from price fluctuations induced by other shocks to the global economy. This paper addresses this issue by developing an approach to assess whether poverty changes induced by trade reform can be statistically discernable, based on a comparison in the grains sector. Fluctuations in grains markets are implemented by incorporating stochastic simulations into a CGE model of the global economy. The resulting price distributions are inputted to a micro-simulation based on national household surveys. The conclusions are based on the comparison of the resulting poverty distributions from the weather-induced variability only, versus the combined effect of the latter and trade reform. Results indicate that, in this conservative approach of evaluating only the global grains markets, the short-run impacts on poverty of trade liberalization can not be distinguished from market volatility in some countries.International Relations/Trade,

Commodity Price Volatility and Nutrition Vulnerability

In this paper we examine the impact of commodity price volatility on nutritional attainment of households at the nutritional poverty line in Bangladesh. We focus on the first two moments of the distribution of nutrition and consider the differential impacts across socio-economic groups within the country. We also examine the direction and magnitude of the shift in these moments as a result of implementation of special safeguards measures aimed at preventing import surges.price volatility, calories, vulnerability, food consumption, poverty, household data, Consumer/Household Economics, Demand and Price Analysis, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Food Security and Poverty, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,

The Poverty Impacts of Global Commodity Trade Liberalization

This paper examines the poverty impacts of global merchandise trade reform by looking at a wide range of developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Overall, we find that trade reform tends to reduce poverty primarily through the inclusion of agricultural components. The majority of our developing country sample experiences small poverty increases from non-agricultural reforms. We explore the relative poverty-friendliness of agricultural trade reforms in detail, examining the differential impacts on real after-tax factor returns of agricultural versus non-agricultural reforms. This analysis is extended to the distribution of households by looking at stratum-specific poverty changes. Our findings indicate that the more favorable impacts of agricultural reforms are driven by increased returns to peasant farm households’ labor as well as higher returns for unskilled wage labor. Finally, we examine the commodity-specific poverty impacts of trade reform for this sample of countries. We find that liberalization of food grains and other processed foods represent the largest contributions to poverty reduction. More specifically, it is tariff reform in these commodity markets that dominates the poverty increasing impacts of wealthy country subsidy removal.Distorted incentives, agricultural and trade policy reforms, national agricultural development, Agricultural and Food Policy, International Relations/Trade, F13, F14, Q17, Q18,

THE WTO DOHA DEVELOPMENT ROUND AND OECD AGRICULTURAL POLICY

A global CGE model featuring agricultural sector detail is used to assess WTO agricultural reform. Parametric uncertainty is considered with model results evaluated based on confidence intervals. We find that continued shift in domestic support to green box payments maintains farmer welfare while providing significant welfare gains to developing regions.International Relations/Trade,