An Impact Study of the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) in the Six ACP Regions

This article intends to present a very detailed analysis of the trade-related aspects of Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) negotiations. We use a dynamic partial equilibrium model – focusing on the demand side – at the HS6 level (covering 5,113 HS6 products). Two alternative lists of sensitive products are constructed, one giving priority to the agricultural sectors, the other focusing on tariff revenue preservation. In order to be WTO compatible, EPAs must translate into 90 percent of bilateral trade fully liberalised. We use this criterion to simulate EPAs for each negotiating regional block. ACP exports to the EU are forecast to be 10 percent higher with the EPAs than under the GSP/EBA option. On average ACP countries are forecast to lose 70 percent of tariff revenues on EU imports in the long run. Yet imports from other regions of the world will continue to provide tariff revenues. Thus when tariff revenue losses are computed on total ACP imports, losses are limited to 26 percent on average in the long run and even 19 percent when the product lists are optimised. The final impact on the economy depends on the importance of tariffs in government revenue and on potential compensatory effects. However this long term and less visible effect will mainly depend on the capacity of each ACP country to reorganise its fiscal base.Preferential Trade Agreements, Africa, EPAs, Partial Equilibrium Simulations, International Relations/Trade,

Introduction

De-industrialization was accelerated by the 2008-2009 crisis in most high income countries. Yet the trend began decades earlier, as comparative advantage of emerging economies shifted towards more advanced goods and their growing populations commanded an increasing share in global demand. This shift towards a factory-free economy in high income countries has drawn the attention of policy makers in North America and Europe. Some politicians have articulated alarming views, initiating mercantilist or beggar thy neighbor cost-competitiveness policies. Yet companies like Apple, which concentrates research and design innovations at home but no longer has any factories in the United States, may be the norm in the future

Politiques commerciales

Apres l’echec retentissant de Seattle, la Ministerielle de Doha (novembre 2001) a permis de lancer un cycle de negociations commerciales susceptibles de faire avancer un certain nombre de dossiers importants, tout en tentant d’apporter des reponses aux questions posees par la societe civile : traitement reserve aux pays en developpement, notamment les PMA, champ d’application des droits de propriete intellectuelle, prise en compte des exigences de developpement durable, specialisation des institutions (et renvoi des normes sociales a l’OIT)…

International Trade and Rent Sharing in Developed and Developing countries.

In this paper, we derive then test a theoretical equation, based on rent sharing theories, linking industry wages to openness variables. This relation has three main features: 1/ it can be easily confronted to the data. 2/ it allows for both impacts of import and export variables to be properly considered in a same testable wage equation. 3/ it stresses explicitly the role of imperfect market structures of goods and labor, as well as their interaction, when studying wages' response to openness. We construct a dataset that provides together trade, activity and labor related data for around 29 industries and 65 countries between 1981 and 1997. We find, for OECD countries, that an increase in export as well as domestic market shares is associated with growth in wages in roughly half of the industries. Among developing countries, Mediterranean followed by Latin American countries, are those where such phenomenon of rent-sharing can be observed. This does not seem to be the case in Asia however.

« Délocalisation des avantages spécifiques et impartition internationale : le cas de l'industrie automobile »

[fre] La stratégie internationale des firmes comporte deux choix distincts : intégrer ou impartir d'une part, localiser d'autre part. La délocalisation des activités productives peut être interprétée à partir de la notion d'« avantages spécifiques ». L'impartition internationale a, par contre, été peu étudiée en tant que phénomène spécifique. L'article apporte une vérification empirique aux thèses de la délocalisation des avantages spécifiques et de l'extension du phénomène d'impartition internationale dans le cas de l'oligopole mondial de l'automobile. [eng] Two main choices are part of the international strategy of the firm : « make of buy » on one hand, location of the production on the other. The « ownership advantages » point of view is a useful tool in order to deal with the internationalization of production. International Sub-Contracting has not yet been studied as a specific phenomenon. The paper gives an empirical evidence of the relocation of ownership advantages and of the extension of Sub-Contracting pratices in the case of the automotive industry oligopoly.

A Re-evaluation of the Impact of Regional Agreements on Trade Patterns

This article analyses the trade impact of preferential trade agreements (PTA). We firstly revisit the literature using a “traditional gravity” setting extended to rely on detailed data at the sector level (26 ISIC industries), using a panel of more than 100 countries between 1976-2000. Secondly we use the border effect methodology. Lastly, dyadic fixed effects make it possible to control for unobserved characteristics of country pairs, hence for the endogeneity of the PTA. We systematically disentangle the various arrangements and tentatively introduce tariffs. The positive trade impacts of the EU, NAFTA and ASEAN are downsized by such improvements.Regional integration; border effects; gravity model