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Bangladesh’s development progress over the past decades has been remarkable. Bangladesh has been among the fastest growing economies in the world. Economic development has translated into higher living standards and improved social and health outcomes. The next years will determine Bangladesh’s longer term development trajectory. The milestones ahead reflect the deep structural transformation of Bangladesh’s economy over the past decades, but also serve as a reminder that further transformation will be required for a prosperous future. Sustaining fast growth and addressing these global challenges will require overcoming three critical growth constraint. This report explores these constraints and proposes actionable reforms to sustain development. It is expected to inform the public and help the authorities design policies to achieve the goals set out in the eighth five year plan and Bangladesh vision 2041. The report focuses on three growth constraints: (i) diversifying exports and increasing competitiveness to reach the next development stage through export-led growth; (ii) mobilizing domestic and international savings to channel them toward productive investment; and (iii) upgrading urban areas, unleashing secondary cities, and improving connectivity to sustain structural transformation and increase productivity. In addition, the implications of digital development and climate change are explored as crosscutting themes across the three topics.

The main aim of this study is to provide an overview of the structure and performance of Ghana’s imports. Specifically, to take into account the effects of the country’s historical trade policy reforms and other determinants during the period 1995-2014. The findings show that, over this period, the country successfully established a few bilateral trade agreements with African and non-African countries. A larger share of Ghana’s imports originate from developed countries. The results also that the leading import sources for Ghana at a continental level include Europe, Asia, and Africa. In Africa, Nigeria is the main source of Ghana’s imports. Ghana’s imports are dominated by manufactured goods. The analysis suggests that Ghana’s imports demand are sensitive to changes in factors, such as trade openness, economic growth, and the exchange rate.

Recent globalization has been characterized by a decline in the costs of cross-border trade in farm and other products. It has been driven primarily by the information and communication technology revolution and—in the case of farm products—by reductions in governmental distortions to agricultural production, consumption and trade. Both have boosted economic growth and reduced poverty globally, especially in Asia. The first but maybe not the second of these drivers will continue in coming decades. World food prices will depend also on whether (and if so by how much) farm productivity growth continues to outpace demand growth and to what extent diets in emerging economies move towards livestock and horticultural products at the expense of staples. Demand in turn will be driven not only by population and income growth, but also by crude oil prices if they remain at current historically high levels, since that will affect biofuel demand. Climate change mitigation policies and adaptation, water market developments and market access standards particularly for transgenic foods will add to future production, price and trade uncertainties.

Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models are often used to simulate the effects of political reforms. In these models the way demand reacts to price and income changes is of crucial importance when one wants to evaluate the evolution of demand in the baseline or simulate the effects of political reforms. Yet, functional forms used to model households’ demand in CGE models do not necessarily exhibit enough flexibility to fully account for income and price changes on the structure of demand. Our objective in this study is to empirically compare the results generated by a CGE using different demand functions, to see if the additional complexity associated to the flexibility of demand really modifies the results and has an impact on policy recommendations. We implement four demand systems in the Mirage model: a Linear Expenditure-Constant Elasticity of Substitution (LES-CES) function, a Cobb-Douglas function, a Constant Elasticity of Substitution (CES) function, and a Normalized Quadratic Expenditure System (NQES) demand system.We conduct simulations of trade reform with a particular focus. We then compare the economic effects of the reform simulated with the different demand functions. From these first results, the LES-CES thus appears to be a good compromise between flexibility and simplicity. It actually requires less parameters and simplifies the model solving compared to the NQES to get similar results.

In this article, the authors discuss the impact of trade policy reforms and related policies on land allocation between several crops in an agricultural economy, with a focus on the degree of erosion caused by different crop types. The prediction of land use changes is complicated by the influence of the world market on agricultural exports and the policy distortions at the national level. Likewise, shifts in the agricultural sectors may have economy-wide repercussions through the factor and commodities markets. The authors quantify and evaluate the probable impacts of tariff reduction with an applied general equilibrium model in Sri Lanka. They also analyze the economic and environmental impact of technical progress in the cultivation of tea, a major agricultural export. Both lowering tariffs and enhancing technical progress increase the amount of land allocated to tea, which is environmentally and economically beneficial to Sri Lanka because tea is less erosive than most alternative crops.

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.

Earnings from farming in many developing countries have been depressed by a pro-urban bias in own-country policies as well as by governments of richer countries favoring their farmers with import barriers and subsidies. Both sets of policies, which reduce national and global economic welfare and contribute to global inequality and poverty, have been undergoing reform since the 1980s. Using the linkage model of the global economy and modifications to the pre-release of version 7 of the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) protection database for 2004, this paper seeks to compare the effect of those reforms to date with those that would come from removing remaining agricultural and trade policies. Two sets of results are thus presented: one showing the effects of policy reforms between 1980-84 and 2004, the other showing what the removal of remaining distortions as of 2004 could be. Both sets of results indicate improvements in the real value of agricultural output and exports, the real returns to farm land and unskilled labor, and real net farm incomes in most developing country regions despite the adverse effect on the international terms of trade for some developing countries that are net food importers or are enjoying preferential access to agricultural markets of high-income countries. Landowners in those high-income countries still offering their farmers price supports could readily afford to compensate them from the benefits of removing remaining agricultural protectionism.

This article assesses the impact of the world price-depressing effect of agricultural subsidies and border protection in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries on developing economies' exports, imports, and welfare. Developing economy exporters are likely to benefit from reductions in such subsidies and trade barriers, whereas net importers may lose as world prices rise. A simple partial equilibrium model of global trade in commodities that benefit from domestic support or export subsidies is developed to estimate the relevant elasticities. Simulation results suggest that a 50 percent reduction in border protection will have a much larger positive impact on developing economies' exports and welfare than a 50 percent reduction in agricultural subsidies. Although there is significant heterogeneity across developing economies, the results suggest that efforts in the Doha round of World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations should be directed at substantially reducing border protection.