are the poverty effects of trade policies invisible beginning with the wto s doha development agenda and establishment of the millennium development goal of reducing poverty by 50 percent by 2015 poverty impacts of trade reforms have become central

a political economy theory of trade agreements we develop a model where trade agreements in addition to correcting terms of trade externalities help governments to commit vis a vis domestic industrial lobbies the model allows us to explore how the characteristics of the political environment aect the structure of the trade agreement and the extent of trade liberalization the model also highlights the role of intersectoral capital mobility in determining trade liberalization in a dynamic extension of the model we explore the extent to which trade liberalization occurs gradually and how its speed depends on the fundamentals of the problem

on constant maskin monotonic social choice functions abstract a social choice function satisfying a dual dominance condition is maskin monotonic if and only if it is constant hence any non constant social choice function satisfying dual dominance is not nash implementable among the important examples are all social choice functions on unrestricted domains on the other hand non constant social choice functions such as a walrasian performance function in economic environments need not satisfy dual dominance

getting the safe minimum standard to work in the real world a case study in moral pragmatism abstract there is growing endorsement of local stake holder conventions to resolve unusual environmental disputes the conventions are separate decision making bodies designed to by pass conventional institutions the hazards of a stake holder convention which is overly detached from conventional decision making leads to a discourse that never successfully confronts the value controversies which the stake holder convention is charged to resolve a case study uncovers obvious and robust strategic manipulations of stake holder conventions that intrude on value dialogue an appeal to the safe minimum standard rules of ciriacy wantrup updated to engage this question successfully corrects some of the more egregious stumbling blocks to good faith dialogue in local discourse the proposed constraints on the stake holder convention can be quite directive authoritative and bureaucratic yet the constraints are necessary to preserve good faith conduct within the dialogue

an impossibility result for virtual implementation with status quo in this paper virtual implementation is restricted to deliver on the equilibrium path either a socially optimal outcome or a status quo an outcome fixed for all preference profiles under such a restriction for any unanimous and implementable social choice function there is a dictator who obtains her most preferable outcome as long as all agents prefer this outcome to the status quo further restrictions on the lottery space and the range of social choice functions allow the dictator to impose her most preferred outcome even when other agents prefer the status quo to this outcome

buffalo hunt international trade and the virtual extinction of the north american bison in the sixteenth century north america contained 25 to 30 million buffalo by the late nineteenth century fewer than 100 remained while removing the buffalo east of the mississippi took over 100 years the remaining 10 to 15 million buffalo on the great plains were killed in a punctuated slaughter lasting little more than ten years i employ theory international trade statistics and first person accounts to argue the slaughter was initiated by a foreign made innovation and fueled by a foreign demand for industrial leather european demand and american policy failure are jointly responsible for the slaughter on the plains jel f14 n51 n71 q57

would freeing up world trade reduce poverty and inequality the vexed role of agricultural distortions trade policy reforms in recent decades have sharply reduced the distortions that were harming agriculture in developing countries yet global trade in farm products continues to be far more distorted than trade in nonfarm goods those distortions reduce some forms of poverty and inequality but worsen others so the net effects are unclear without empirical modeling this paper summarizes a series of new economy wide global and national empirical studies that focus on the net effects of the remaining distortions to world merchandise trade on poverty and inequality globally and in various developing countries the global linkage model results suggest that removing those remaining distortions would reduce international inequality largely by boosting net farm incomes and raising real wages for unskilled workers in developing countries and would reduce the number of poor people worldwide by 3 percent the analysis based on the global trade analysis project model for a sample of 15 countries and nine stand alone national case studies all point to larger reductions in poverty especially if only the non poor are subjected to increased income taxation to compensate for the loss of trade tax revenue

ecological thresholds a survey abstract the existence of ecological discontinuities and thresholds has been recognised by ecological economics as a key feature to take into account in the study of environment economy interactions this paper reviews some theoretical developments and empirical studies dealing with ecological phenomena involving non linear dynamics the literature about this issue reveals that there is abundant evidence of discontinuities and threshold effects as the consequence of human perturbations on ecological systems however due to the complexities involved the predictive capacity of ecology is limited and large uncertainties still remain

strategic manipulation in voting games when lotteries and ties are permitted abstract a gibbard satterthwaite type theorem is established for random decision rules and rules that permit ties the rules use full information on how individuals rank lotteries and sets of outcomes the theorem allows restrictions on the domain of rankings journal of economic literature classification numbers d7 c7

beyond the wto an anatomy of eu and us preferential trade agreements it is often alleged that ptas involving the ec and the us include a significant number of obligations in areas not currently covered by the wto agreement such as investment protection competition policy labour standards and environmental protection the primary purpose of this study is to highlight the extent to which these claims are true the study divides the contents of all ptas involving the ec and the us currently notified to the wto into 14 wto and 38 wto x areas where wto provisions come under the current mandate of the wto and wto x provisions deal with issues lying outside the current wto mandate as a second step the legal enforceability of each obligation is evaluated and judged on the extent to which the text specifies clear obligations among the findings are i ec agreements contain almost four times as many instances of wto x provisions as do us agreements ii but ec agreements evidence a very significant amount of legal inflation i e non legally enforceable provisions in the wto x category and us agreements actually contain more enforceable wto x provisions than do the ec agreements iii us agreements tend to emphasise regulatory areas more compared to ec agreements 2010 blackwell publishing ltd

threshold effects and incentives for the conservation of biodiversity biological diversity is a central component of the stock of natural capital on which all economic development is based other things being equal loss of biologically diversity implies loss of development potential and its conservation through sustainable use or outright protection implies the protection of that potential one characteristics of biodiversity loss of especial importance is that biodiversity loss more than any other current environmental problem is associated with ecological threshold effects the paper explores the implication of this characteristics for the properties of a biodiversity conservation strategy

optimal food price stabilization in a small open developing country in poor countries most governments implement policies aiming to stabilize the prices of staple foods which often include storage and trade measures insulating their domestic market from the world market it is of crucial importance to understand the precise motivations and efficiency of those interventions because they can have consequences worldwide this paper addresses those issues by analyzing the case of a small open developing country confronted by shocks to both the crop yield and foreign price in this model government interventions may be justified by the lack of an insurance market for food prices considering this market imperfection the authors design optimal public interventions through trade and storage policies they show that an optimal trade policy largely consists of subsidizing imports and taxing exports which benefits consumers at the expense of producers import subsidies alleviate the non negativity of food storage in other words when stocks are exhausted subsidizing imports prevents domestic price spikes one striking result an optimal storage policy on its own is detrimental to consumers since its stabilizing benefits leak into the world market and it raises the average domestic price by contrast an optimal combination of storage and trade policies results in a powerful stabilizing effect for domestic food prices

towards an ecological economics of sustainability abstract persistent disagreement both as to the interpretation to be given to sustainability and as to the relation between ecological and economic sustainability has hindered the development of an ecological economics of sustainable resource use this paper identifies the main concepts of sustainability deriving from the two disciplines in order to explore the difference implied by an ecological approach to the problem it is argued that present economic and ecological approaches are largely disjoint and that they address basically different phenomena by combining the efficiency requirements of what is usually thought of as economic sustainability with the stability requirements of an ecological approach it is shown that an intertemporally efficient allocation of resources that satisfies the conditions for constant levels of consumption is not necessary to assure ecological sustainability ecological sustainability requires that the allocation of economic resources should not result in the instability of the economy environment system as a whole

in search of the holy grail policy convergence experimentation and economic performance we consider a model of policy choice in which appropriate policies depend on a country s own circumstances but the presence of a successful leader generates an informational externality and results in too little policy experimentation corrupt governments are reined in while honest governments are disciplined inefficiently our model yields distinct predictions about the patterns of policy imitation corruption and economic performance as a function of a country s location vis aa vis successful leaders in particular it predicts a u shaped pattern in economic performance as we move away from the leader in the relevant space of characteristics close neighbors should do very well distant countries moderately well on average with considerable variance and intermediate countries worst of all an empirical test with the experience of post socialist countries provides supportive results

formulas and flexibility in trade negotiations sensitive agricultural products in the world trade organization s doha agenda many trade negotiations involve large cuts in high tariffs while allowing smaller cuts for an agreed share of politically sensitive products the effects of these flexibilities on market access opportunities are difficult to predict creating particular problems for developing countries in assessing whether to support a proposed trade agreement some widely used ad hoc approaches for identifying likely sensitive products such as the highest bound tariff rule suggest that the impact of a limited number of such exceptions on average tariffs and market access is likely to be minor applying a rigorous specification based on the apparent objectives of policymakers in setting the prenegotiation tariff enables more accurate assessment of the implications of sensitive product provisions for average agricultural tariffs economic welfare and market access under the doha negotiations the analysis concludes that highest tariff rules are likely to seriously underestimate the impacts on average tariffs and that treating even two percent of tariff lines as sensitive is likely to have a sharply adverse impact on economic welfare the impacts on market access are also adverse but much smaller perhaps reflecting the mercantilist focus of the negotiating process

optimal regulation of eutrophying lakes fjords and rivers in the presence of threshold effects eutrophication is a biological process that has an unfavorable economic impact on the economic value of the water basins it affects eutrophication depends on thresholds effects and optimal policies for the regulation of eutrophication must take this into account such optimal policies are derived in the present article by utilizing a novel technique in optimal control theory this technique facilitates a proper analysis of deterministic stock pollutants with thresholds effects a topic it is argued has been poorly understood in the literature copyright 2001 oxford university press

trade liberalization in the bio economy coping with a new landscape multilateral trade liberalization has made little progress over the last period but preferential agreements have multiplied recent economic literature helps understand the current negotiation game new economic and political conditions in particular the gaining influence of emerging countries make a multilateral agreement more difficult developed countries have given up many of their bargaining chips in previous rounds of negotiation and their remaining agricultural tariffs are not sufficient for extracting the concessions from emerging countries on services procurement and intellectual property that would make an agreement possible the risk of a more fragmented world calls for a revised negotiation agenda and a change in the status of developing countries research issues are outlined in order to help revitalize the doha negotiation agenda

option value an exposition and extension this article examines the role of the discount rate in making decisions that will have significant implications for the environment the authors begin by providing a rationale for discounting in general and by describing the main factors that determine

economic instruments for environmental regulation our knowledge about economic incentive approaches to pollution control has grown rapidly in the two decades in which they have received serious analytical attention not only have the theoretical models become more focused and the empirical work more detailed but we have now had over a decade of experience with emissions trading in the u s and emission charges in europe as the world community becomes increasingly conscious of both the need to tighten environmental controls and the local economic perils associated with tighter controls in a highly competitive global marketplace it seems a propitious time to stand back and to organize what we have learned about this practical and promising approach to pollution control that may be especially relevant to current circumstances this paper draws upon economic theory empirical studies and actual experience with implementation to provide a brief overview of some of the major lessons we have learned about two economic incentive approaches emissions tradi copyright 1990 by oxford university press

the environment as a commodity all economic activity is based ultimately on re sources found in nature whether it is consumption the point in exposing the morphology of produced or production or whether it is exchange the comgoods and services is not to construct a resource moditi es which are involved are made of constitutheory of a value there are any number of natural ents provided by nature thus the ingredients of resources and this alone precludes such an at any manufactured good are other produced goods tempted theory from being coherent my purpose labour time and skills and natural resources each rather is to use it to express surprise at the fact that of these constituent produced goods is in turn made despite the centrality of natural resources in eco up from the ingredients that went into its manufacnomic activity they find little room in economics ture namely labour time and skills natural rediscourses interest in resource economics more sources and further produced goods it follows particularly environmental economics has only that any manufactured commodity is ultimately a been intermittent and if we are currently witness combination of labour and natural resources ing a resurgence and this special issue is an ex ample of it we have also just lived through a labour too is a produced good even raw labour is decade long neglect during which much valuable an output manufactured by those natural resources research could have been done 2 we are way behind which sustain life resources such as the multitude where we should have been and could have been

trade tragedy and the commons we develop a theory of resource management where the degree to which coun tries escape the tragedy of the commons and hence the de facto property rights regime is endogenously determined three forces determine success or failure in resource management the regulator s enforcement power the extent of har vesting capacity and the ability of the resource to generate competitive returns without being extinguished the model can explain heterogeneity across coun tries and resources in the effectiveness of resource management and it predicts that changes in prices population and technology can cause transitions to better or worse management regimes jel p14 q21 q22 q23 q32 many of the world s major renewable resource stocks are in a state of decline this is true for capture fisheries for forests in developing countries and for many measures of the biosphere s health other renewable resources including many species of wildlife marine mammals and coral reefs are also under threat while poverty and government corruption are surely respon sible for some of this record particular emphasis is often placed on the potentially damaging role played by international trade this emphasis is not surprising given that natural resource products are a key export for much of the developing world and property rights over renewable resources are both difficult to define and poorly enforced but property rights are not an immutable country characteristic such as weather mineral deposits or topography they are instead market institutions developed to facilitate transactions and protect scarce resources consequently changes in prices technology and other effects of market integration may alter the de facto property rights regime and lead to impacts quite dif ferent from those predicted by existing analyses the purpose of this paper is to examine renew able resource use within a framework where the enforcement of property rights and hence the efficacy of resource management is endogenously determined we develop a theory where an existing government regulates the use of a renewable resource by a set of agents who have a right to harvest the resource could be a fishery forest stock aquifer etc and we assume it is local and therefore contained within one country the govern ment sets rules limiting harvests but agents may cheat on these allocations and risk punishment property rights are endogenous in this framework because the government must account for agents incentive to cheat as a result the effective protection for the resource or what we refer to as the de facto property rights regime may be far from perfect even though property rights would be perfectly enforced if there was no monitoring problem

nash equilibrium and welfare optimality if is a set of social alternatives a social choice rule scr assigns a subset of a to each potential profile of individuals preferences over a where the subset is interpreted as the set of welfare optima a game form or mechanism implements the social choice rule if for any potential profile of preferences 1 any welfare optimum can arise as a nash equilibrium of the game form implying in particular that a nash equilibrium exists and 2 all nash equilibria are welfare optimal the main result of this paper establishes that any scr that satisfies two properties monotonicity and no veto power can be implemented by a game form if there are three or more individuals the proof is constructive