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While Malaysia’s economy has had great success, it also faces several challenges including limited services trade. This report seeks to explain the main constraints that are holding back the services sector in the country. The key finding is that Malaysia’s development strategy needs to pivot to better capture new trade patterns. This will need to address some of the main constraints facing the development of Malaysia’s services sector. First, is low labor productivity. Secondly, is informality. Thirdly, weak educational outcomes in Malaysia contribute to skills shortages. Finally, limits to competition and regulatory restrictions in services restrict Malaysia’s ability to deepen foreign linkages. The key recommendation of the report is that to fulfill the potential of its services sector, Malaysia should take an integrated approach that progressively and gradually addresses artificial policy distinctions between goods and services, and between trade and investment in a world increasingly governed by international production networks.

What kinds of tariff reform are likely to raise welfare in situations where tariff revenue is important? General conditions for welfare to rise without reducing tariff revenue are opaque. We show that they can be greatly simplified using a small number of sufficient statistics, primarily the generalized mean and variance of tariffs. We present sufficient conditions for a class of linear tariff reform rules that guarantee higher welfare without a loss in revenue. The rules consist of convex combinations of (i) trade-weighted-average-tariff-preserving cuts in dispersion; and (ii) uniform tariff cuts that preserve domestic relative prices among tariff-ridden goods.

Despite significant challenges, Sri Lanka's economic performance remained broadly satisfactory in the first half of 2017. The corrective policy measures taken in the monetary and fiscal fronts have led to gradual stabilization. The construction sector's rapid recovery supported by a strong rebound in investment was partially able to mitigate the impact of inclement weather conditions on the real sector. External buffers strengthened thanks to foreign exchange purchases and improved capital flows. Inflation has risen since the second half of 2016 on account of drought and changes to the VAT Act. Authorities pursued the economic reform agenda presented in the government policy statements, albeit at a slower pace, owing to the difficulties faced in a complex political environment and institutional constraints on policy implementation. Parliament passed a new Inland Revenue Law in September 2017, which marks a key milestone towards sustainable revenue-led fiscal consolidation.

This study reviews policy developments in recent years and, in the light of that, explores ways in which further consensus might be reached among WTO members to reduce farm trade distortions - and thereby also progress the multilateral trade reform agenda. Particular attention is given to ways that would boost well-being in developing countries, especially for those food-insecure households still suffering from poverty and hunger.

What kind of tariff reform is likely to raise welfare in situations where tariff revenue is important? Uncertainty about specification and risk from imprecise parameter estimates of any particular specification reduce the credibility of simulation estimates. A promising alternative is to develop rules which are robust with respect to such uncertainty. We present sufficient conditions for a class of linear rules that guarantee welfare-improving tariff reform. The rules span cones of welfare-improving tariff reforms consisting of convex combinations of (i) trade-weighted-average-tariff-preserving dispersion cuts; and (ii) uniform tariff cuts that preserve domestic relative prices among tariff-ridden goods.

International markets for agricultural products are often subject to a range of trade barriers, and horticultural products are no exception. This paper examines the economic implications of tariffs and sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) regulations that are applied to global markets for fresh apples and fresh oranges. We calculate regional-level tariff rates and ad valorem equivalents for SPS barriers following the price-wedge approach. A simulation model is developed and used to assess the price, quantity, and welfare implications of reducing tariffs, removing SPS barriers, and removing SPS barriers that have been identified as a Special Trade Concern (STC) by the World Trade Organization. Results suggest that a 36% reduction in global tariffs would lead to greater welfare gains than would the elimination of SPS measures in apple markets. However, in orange markets we find that SPS measures have much larger economic implications for producers and consumers. Here a 36% reduction in tariffs would lead to smaller overall welfare effects compared to removal of all SPS measures, and only slightly larger effects than those from removal of STCs alone.

With the advent of the WTO’s Doha Development Agenda, as well as the Millennium Development Goals aiming to reduce poverty by 50 percent by 2015, poverty impacts of trade reforms have attracted increasing attention. This has been particularly true of agricultural trade reform due to the importance of food in the diets of the poor, relatively higher protection in agriculture, as well as the heavy concentration of global poverty in rural areas where agriculture is the main source of income. Yet some in this debate have argued that, given the extreme volatility in agricultural commodity markets, the additional price and poverty impacts due to trade liberalization might well be undetectable. This paper formally tests this “invisibility hypothesis” via stochastic simulation of a computable general equilibrium framework. The hypothesis test is based on the comparison of two sets of price and poverty distributions. The first originates solely from the inherent variability in global staple grains markets, while the second combines the effects of this inherent variability and trade reform. Results indicate that the short-run impacts of trade liberalization on poverty are not distinguishable from market volatility in majority of the fifteen focus countries – suggesting that the poverty impacts of agricultural trade liberalization may indeed be invisible.

Reforms in recent decades have sharply reduced the distortions affecting agriculture in developing countries, particularly by cuts to agricultural export taxes and by some reductions in government assistance to agriculture in high-income countries, but international trade in farm products continues to be far more distorted than trade in nonfarm goods. This paper summarizes a series of empirical studies that focus on the effects of the remaining distortions to world merchandise trade for poverty and inequality, especially in developing countries. To obtain different insights into the various impacts, two global studies are undertaken using the World Bank's Linkage model, one multi-country study uses the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) model, and ten country case studies are also included, each using a national economy-wide model. The Linkage model results suggest that liberalization will reduce international inequality, largely by boosting farm incomes and raising real wages for unskilled workers in developing countries, and will reduce the number of poor people worldwide by 3 percent. The analysis based on the GTAP model for a sample of 15 countries, and the ten 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.

This paper analyzes the economic effects of agricultural price and merchandise trade policies around the world as of 2004 on global markets, net farm incomes, and national and regional economic welfare and poverty, using the global economy wide Linkage model, new estimates of agricultural price distortions for developing countries, and poverty elasticity's approach. It addresses two questions: to what extent are policies as of 2004 still reducing rewards from farming in developing countries and thereby adding to inequality across countries in farm household incomes? Are they depressing value added more in primary agriculture than in the rest of the economy of developing countries, and earnings of unskilled workers more than of owners of other factors of production, thereby potentially contributing to inequality and poverty within developing countries (given that farm incomes are well below non-farm incomes in most developing countries and that agriculture there is intensive in the use of unskilled labor)? Results are presented for the key countries and regions of the world and for the world as a whole. They reveal that, by moving to free markets, income inequality between countries will be reduced at least slightly, all but one-sixth of the gains to developing countries will come from agricultural policy reform, unskilled workers in developing countries the majority of whom work on farms will benefit most from reform, net farm incomes in developing countries will rise by 6 percent compared with 2 percent for non-agricultural value added, and the number of people surviving on less than US$1 a day will drop 3 percent globally.

Structural adjustment is defined as the farm household’s behavior of changing its existing farm asset distribution toward more specialized or diversified directions. Farm households are classified into agricultural or non-agricultural based ones. Estimated expected income through switching regression model reveals that higher revenue is expected when adjustment paths toward more specialization and more non-agricultural based activities are chosen.

AustraliaÂ’s lacklustre economic growth performance in the first four decades following World War II was in part due to an anti-trade, anti-primary sector bias in government assistance policies. This paper provides new annual estimates of the extent of those biases since 1946 and their gradual phase-out during the past two decades. In doing so it reveals that the timing of the sectoral assistance cuts was such as sometimes to improve but sometimes to worsen the distortions to incentives faced by farmers. Also, the changes increased the variation of assistance rates within agriculture during the 1950s and 1960s, reducing the welfare contribution of those programs in that period. While the assistance pattern within agriculture appears not to have been strongly biased against exporters, its reform has coincided with a substantial increase in export orientation of many farm industries. The overall pattern for Australia is contrasted with that revealed by comparable new estimates for other high-income countries.

This paper empirically investigates the impact of agricultural trade reform in South Africa. Using UNCTAD’s Agricultural Trade Policy Simulation Model (ATPSM), the study investigates two specific scenarios that capture the magnitude of (i) the economic impact of global agricultural trade reform in South Africa and (ii) the economic impact if the reform in South Africa is coupled with agricultural reforms in the European Union (EU). Trade reform focuses on substantial tariff reduction; although in the case of the EU, scenarios also include reduction in domestic support and export subsidies. The results show that a unilateral tariff reduction in a selected number of agricultural products amounts to welfare gains of US$21 million. These gains are three times higher when accompanied by extensive reforms in the EU.

We show that the standard concertina result for tariff reforms – i.e. lowering the highest tariff increases welfare – no longer holds in general if we allow for international capital mobility. The result can break down if the good whose tariff is lowered is not capital intensive. If the concertina reform lowers welfare it lowers market access as well, thereby compromising a second goal that is typically connected with trade liberalisation. JEL-Classification: F11, F13, F15 Key words: Trade Policy Reform, International Factor Mobility, Welfare, Market Access

The claim by global trade modelers that the potential contribution to global economic welfare of removing agricultural subsidies is less than one-tenth of that from removing agricultural tariffs puzzles many observers. To help explain that result, the authors first compare the OECD and model-based estimates of the extent of the producer distortions (leaving aside consumer distortions), and show that 75 percent of total support is provided by market access barriers when account is taken of all forms of support to farmers and to agricultural processors globally, and only 19 percent to domestic farm subsidies. Then the authors provide a back-of-the-envelope (BOTE) calculation of the welfare cost of those distortions. Assuming unitary supply and demand elasticities, that BOTE analysis suggests 86 percent of the welfare cost is due to tariffs and only 6 percent to domestic farm subsidies. When the higher costs associated with the greater variability of trade measures relative to domestic support are accounted for, the BOTE estimate of the latter's share falls to 4 percent. This is close to the 5 percent generated by the most commonly used global model (GTAP) and reported in the paper's final section.

The authors estimate the impact of global merchandise trade distortions and services regulations on agricultural value added in various countries. Using the latest versions of the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) database and the GTAP-AGR model of the global economy, their results suggest real net farm incomes would rise in developing countries with a move to free trade, thereby alleviating rural poverty. This occurs despite a terms of trade deterioration for developing countries that are net food importers or that enjoy preferential access to agricultural markets of high-income countries. The authors also show, for several large developing countries, the contribution of their own versus other countries' trade policies.

This paper provides new estimates of the global gains from multilateral trade reform and their distribution among developing countries in the presence of trade preferences. Particular attention is given to agriculture, as farmers constitute the poorest households in developing countries but the most assisted in rich countries. The latest GTAP database (Version 6.05) and the World Bank’s LINKAGE model of the global economy are employed to examine the impact first of current merchandise trade barriers and agricultural subsidies, and then of possible reform outcomes from the WTO’s Doha Development Agenda. The results suggest moving to free global merchandise trade would boost real incomes in Sub-Saharan Africa proportionately more than in other developing countries or high-income countries, despite a terms of trade loss in parts of that region. Net farm incomes would all rise substantially in that and other developing country regions, thereby alleviating rural poverty. A Doha partial liberalization could move the world some way towards those desirable outcomes, but more so the more developing countries themselves cut applied tariffs, particularly on agricultural imports.

As a consequence of global changes to trade policy, there are likely to be significant impacts on international agricultural trade. Clearly producers in the European Union (EU) will experience considerable changes to the structure of their industry, and for a country such as New Zealand, heavily dependent on agricultural exports, changes to policy and markets have the potential to significantly affect the economy. The potential competition from China in terms of agricultural commodities as well as its potential as an export destination for NZ are also important considerations. This paper presents an analysis of the impact of both World Trade Organisation (WTO) and Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform in the agricultural sectors of the EU, New Zealand, and China. The analysis covers the livestock sectors of these countries. The model used for this analysis is the LTEM (Lincoln Trade and Environment Model).

This is one of 10 studies for the Copenhagen Consensus Project that sought to evaluate the most feasible opportunities to improve welfare globally and alleviate poverty in developing countries. The author argues that phasing out distortionary government subsidies and barriers to international trade will yield an extraordinarily high benefit-cost ratio. A survey is provided of recent estimates using global economy-wide simulation models of the benefits of doing that by way of the current Doha round of multilateral trade negotiations. Even if adjustment costs are several times as large as suggested by available estimates, the benefit-cost ratio from seizing this opportunity exceeds 20. That is much higher than the rewards from regional or bilateral trade agreements or from providing preferential access for least-developed countries'exports to high-income countries. Such reform would simultaneously contribute to alleviating several of the other key challenges reflected in the United Nation's Millennium Development Goals.