Climate change and trade policy : from mutual destruction to mutual support

Contrary to what is still often believed, the climate and trade communities have a lot in common: a common problem (a global"public good"), common foes (vested interests using protection for slowing down climate change policies), and common friends (firms delivering goods, services, and equipment that are both cleaner and cheaper). They have thus many reasons to buttress each other. The climate community would enormously benefit from adopting the principle of"national treatment,"which would legitimize and discipline the use of carbon border tax adjustment and the principle of"most-favored nation,"which would ban carbon tariffs. The main effect of this would be to fuel a dual world economy of clean countries trading between themselves and dirty countries trading between themselves at a great cost for climate change. And the trade community would enormously benefit from a climate community capable of designing instruments that would support the adjustment efforts to be made by carbon-intensive firms much better than instruments such as antidumping or safeguards, which have proved to be ineffective and perverse. That said, implementing these principles will be difficult. The paper focuses on two key problems. First, the way carbon border taxes are defined has a huge impact on the joint outcome from climate change, trade, and development perspectives. Second, the multilateral climate change regime could easily become too complex to be manageable. Focusing on carbon-intensive sectors and building"clusters"of production processes considered as having"like carbon-intensity"are the two main ways for keeping the regime manageable.Developing them in a multilateral framework would make them more transparent and unbiased.Climate Change Mitigation and Green House Gases,Climate Change Economics,Emerging Markets,Carbon Policy and Trading,Debt Markets

The Uruguay negotiations on subsidies and countervailing measures : past and future constraints

The Uruguay Round Negotiating Groups on countervailing and antidumping procedures share many common issues. This is not accidental, claims this paper, but mirrors the way import-competing firms have become the driving force of antidumping and countervailing procedures set up under the Tokyo Round. Countervailing actions are likely to be a poor instrument for limiting subsidies for economic reasons inherent in the profit maximizing behaviour of the complaining firms. However, to strengthen disciplines on countervailing measures would be meaningless without narrowing the currently pervasive definition of dumping and strengthening disciplines in antidumping procedures. This is related to the fact that US and EC firms have increasingly used antidumping procedures as a substitute for countervailing actions. The paper underlines the importance of disciplines in antidumping procedures by noting the links between antidumping, safeguard procedures, and the Multifibre Arrangement.TF054105-DONOR FUNDED OPERATION ADMINISTRATION FEE INCOME AND EXPENSE ACCOUNT,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Globalization and Financial Integration,Taxation&Subsidies

La forteresse Europe. Commentaire

Messerlin Patrick A. La forteresse Europe. Commentaire. In: Revue d'économie financière. Hors-série, 1994. Bretton Woods : mélanges pour un cinquantenaire. pp. 312-314

Politiques commerciales et de la concurrence.

[eng] Trade policy vs competition policy. . The paper looks at the issues raised by the difficult coexistence between trade and competition policies within the context of GATT and WTO. It shows that these issues, though traditional, are now occurring in a new, particularly difficult, context due to the frequent enforcement by governments of trade policies with an anticompetitive content. The paper reviews the various proposals for addressing these problems, and it suggests an approach somewhat more limited but more realistic. [fre] Cet article examine les problèmes posés par la coexistence diff cile entre les politiques du commerce extérieur et de la concurrence dans le contexte du GATT et de son héritière Organisation mondiale du commerce OMC Elle montre que ces problèmes ils sont traditionnels se posent en des termes nouveaux particulièrement graves cause de la mise en uvre parles tats de politiques commerciales visée anticoncurrentielle Cet article passe en revue les proposi tions actuelles pour résoudre ces difficultés et offre une approche plus limitée mais plus réaliste