Studies in Trade and Investment - AGRICULTURAL TRADE - PLANTING THE SEEDS OF REGIONAL LIBERALIZATION IN ASIA

this chapter focuses on the political economy of Chinese agricultural trade policy and speculates its future development.agricultural reform, World Trade Organization, preferential trade negotiations, China

Chinese Agricultural Reform the WTO and FTA Negotiations

China's early industrialization created distortions.This paper identifies major distortions in the Chinese economy in the pre-reform era and brings agricultural distortions into perspective.Agricultural Reform,China, Liberalization,WTO, FTA

Chinese Agricultural Reform, the WTO and FTA Negotiations

China's early industrialization created distortions. This paper identifies major distortions in the Chinese economy in the pre-reform era and brings agricultural distortions into perspective. Comparison is made of the reform experience in Chinese industry and agriculture. It suggests that with limited arable land, it is difficult to align Chinese agricultural production fully with its comparative advantage without also reforming China's grain policy. Reform has substantially freed up agricultural production but border distortions serve as one of a few remaining effective measures to ensure the grain self-sufficiency target. Unlike agricultural protection in rich countries, China's grain self-sufficiency policy ahs much weaker institutional underpinnings and is susceptible to the influence of interest groups. The patterns of Chinese agricultural trade explain its ambiguous positions in WTO agriculture negotiations. In terms of grain sectoral adjustment, a possible comprehensive China-Australia FTA is consistent with the multilateral process, while the China-ASEAN FTA is not. There is no evidence that the China-ASEAN FTA helps with the WTO agriculture negotiations, particularly when rice is excluded from the deal; but China-Australia FTA could generate competitive liberalization in grain trade, and thus help with the global agricultural liberalization.Agricultural Trade, WTO, Free Trade Agreement

A Globally Consistent Framework for Reliability-based Trade Statistics Reconciliation in the Presence of an Entrepôt

This paper develops a mathematicla programming model to reconcile trade statistics subject to a set of global consistency conditions in the presence of an entrepot. Initial data reliability serves a key function for governing the magnitude of adjustment. Through a two-stage optimization procedure, the adjusted trade statistics are achived as solutions to a system of simultaneous equations that minimize a quadratic penalty function. As an empirical illustration, the model is applied to reconcile the 2004 trade statistics reported by China, Hong Kong, and their major trading partners, initialized with detailed estimates of bilateral trade flows, re-export markups, cif/fob ratios and data reliability indexes.trade statistics reconciliation, entrepot trade, data reliability, global consistency

THREE CENTURIES OF INEQUALITY IN BRITAIN AND AMERICA

Income and wealth inequality rose over the first 150 years of U.S. history. They may have risen at times in Britain before 1875. The first half of this century equalized pre-fisc incomes more in Britain than in America. From the 1970s to the 1990s inequality rose in both countries, reversing some of the previous equalization. Government redistribution explains part but not all of the reversals in inequality trends. Factor-market forces and economic growth would have produced a similar chronology of rises and falls in income inequality even without shifts in the progressivity of redistribution through government. For economies starting from highly unequal property ownership, the development process lowers inequality. History suggests, however, that this may happen only once. Redistribution toward the poor tends to happen least in those times and polities where it would seem most justified by the usual goals of welfare policy.

Approximate symmetry reduction approach: infinite series reductions to the KdV-Burgers equation

For weak dispersion and weak dissipation cases, the (1+1)-dimensional KdV-Burgers equation is investigated in terms of approximate symmetry reduction approach. The formal coherence of similarity reduction solutions and similarity reduction equations of different orders enables series reduction solutions. For weak dissipation case, zero-order similarity solutions satisfy the Painlev\'e II, Painlev\'e I and Jacobi elliptic function equations. For weak dispersion case, zero-order similarity solutions are in the form of Kummer, Airy and hyperbolic tangent functions. Higher order similarity solutions can be obtained by solving linear ordinary differential equations.Comment: 14 pages. The original model (1) in previous version is generalized to a more extensive form and the incorrect equations (35) and (36) in previous version are correcte

Chinese Foreign Trade Performance and the China-US Trade 1995 – 2004 - A Graphical Analysis Based on China Customs Statistics

Using detailed Chinese Customs data, this paper prepares a series of graphsto illustrate the changing patterns of the Chinese foreign trade during theyears 1995 and 2004. Combined with discussions on related literature andpolicy development during the same period, the graphs are organized (1) to establish links between FDI inflow and Chinese trade expansion, (2) toidentify the regional and sectoral power horses of Chinese trade growth, (3)to sketch a picture of production sharing among China, its Asian neighborsand the United States, and (4) to highlight the institutional innovation of theChinese customs regime that helps facilitate the process of globaloutsourcing to China. Special attention is given to the China-US tradewhen it differs significantly from the China world trade.trade, production fragmentation, FDI