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Energy Subsidies & Trade

Subsidies often exist because of ambitions related to trade and investment. Trade is also a place where negative effects of subsidies are often felt the hardest - by non-subsidizing countries. The GSI explores how trade could address fossil fuel subsidies more effectively.

Commentary: Climate Change: Is there Place for a WTO Anti-Subsidy Strategy?

In a recent article ("A New Agenda for Global Warming"), Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics and former Chief Economist at the World Bank, suggests that Japan, Europe, and the other signatories of Kyoto should immediately bring a WTO subsidy case against the United States for not ratifying the Kyoto Convention and for not taxing adequately CO2 emissions by US firms.

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Commentary: An Introduction to Service Subsidies

The last round of World Trade Organization (WTO) trade talks, the Uruguay Round, broke new ground by broadening the scope of world trade rules to cover areas never before subject to multilateral disciplines, and the services sector was without doubt where such broadening was most significant in economic terms.

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Agricultural Subsidies: An Opportunity Lost?

The U.S. refusal to make deeper cuts to its agricultural subsidies was one of the main reasons for suspension of negotiations at the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Geneva. The United States was offering more cuts, but only if other countries made much bigger cuts to their tariffs. Since the U.S. offer on subsidies was still limited and since none of the other WTO members had a mandate to get near the U.S. market access demands, governments called it quits.

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Blog: Modeling the Gains from Trade Liberalization

In the early years of this decade, as the World Trade Organization's "Doha Round" of multilateral trade negotiations began to take shape, simulations carried out by the World Bank suggested that the world economy would be as much as $800 billion richer with an ambitious and successful trade round, and that approximately two-thirds of these gains would be appropriated by developing countries.

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Studies: What Can the Poor Expect from Trade Liberalization?

The primary tools for determining the impact trade liberalization will have on poverty are multi-country Computable General Equilibrium Models (CGEM). However, the models that have been derived from this method have come to some very different results. In recent years these results have also been revised downwards, predicting more moderate gains from trade liberalization. Antoine Boukt, Sr. Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), examines this phenomenon in detail, comparing the merits of the various methodologies, and explaining why their results diverge.

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