Trade Policy and Global Poverty
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Opinions
- Despite Trade Pact Delay, Colombia Deserves U.S. Help (Christian Science Monitor)
- What to Read: Inequality and Development in a Globalizing World (Syllabus)
- Trade Talks Collapse: Who's to Blame and What Next?
- Letters to The Editor: Farm Subsidies: Necessary Evil? (Washington Post)
- Controversy over World Bank trade & poverty estimates
- Doha Prospects: Q&A with Kimberly Elliott
- Letters to The Editor: West's Farm Subsidies Cut Off Market Access for Poorer Nations' Goods (Financial Times)
Articles
- The Democrats Dither on Trade (Post)
- Reviving Doha? Time for the U.S. to Lead
- Rich nations slow in helping poor: index [Taipei Times]
- Ranking the Rich: NZ fifth in helping poor countries [New Zealand's National Business Review]
- Poverty: what counts [Financial Times]
- Australia slips down 'aid rankings' [The Sydney Morning Herald]
- A year after Gleneagles pledges, Britain slips down [Guardian - London]
- Rich nations under fire on pledges to fight poverty [Financial Times - London]
- Foreign aid tops world ranking [Denmark]
- Netherlands 'does most for poor' [BBC News - UK]
- Swiss development aid fails to make big impact [Swissinfo - Switzerland]
- Japan ranks worst in contribution to developing world [Mainichi Daily News-Japan]
- British policy let down by arms sales [The Independent - UK]
- Canada earns low grade for belching pollution [CanWest News Service - Canada]
- Dutch, Danes and Swedes do most for world's poor [EUobserver.com]
- Trade Talks Collapse: Who's to Blame and What Next?
- New from the Commitment to Development Index
- Ending Aid to Rich Farmers May Hurt the Poor Ones [NYT]
- World Bank Reconsiders Trade's Benefits to Poor [WaPo]
- Don't Scream at Me Argentina, trade with me
- Constellation of interests clouds Doha talks [FT]
- CDI Maps
- Tsunami aid slow to reach Aceh
- Denmark leads rich nations in spreading wealth
- Sharing the Wealth, or Not
- Australia a good global citizen
- UK and US do better on helping developing world
- Denmark tops list of those helping poor nations; Japan last
- Rich world policies to help poor improve - study
- U.S. Ranks 12th Among Richest Nations for Foreign Aid
- Fair Trade: For Better or Worse?
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William Cline
06/01/2004
The stakes of the poor in trade policy are large: Free trade can help 500 million people escape poverty and inject $200 billion annually into the economies of developing countries, according to author William R. Cline.
This study shows how changes in trade policies in the United States and other industrial countries could help reduce poverty in developing countries. Cline first reviews the extent of global poverty and its relationship to trade and growth. He then examines the key components of these relationships to identify lines of trade policy action that could help reduce global poverty.
Cline introduces the concept of “poverty intensity of trade” as a gauge of the potential for the trade policy instrument to affect global poverty. He examines the evidence on recent regimes of trade preferences for poor countries, including the European Union’s All but Arms initiative, and the United States’ Caribbean Basin Initiative and African Growth and Opportunity Act, and outlines steps to enhance especially the latter.
Cline judges that the developing countries were right to risk collapse of the Doha Round at the Cancún ministerial meeting in September 2003 by insisting on much deeper liberalization of agriculture than the industrial countries were then willing to offer.
He then reviews access of developing countries to markets in developed countries. Based on a “general equilibrium” model of world trade he calculates the potential impact of multilateral trade liberalization on unskilled wages and poverty in developing countries. After further taking into account the concentration of the world’s poor in the agricultural sector, as well as the recent evidence relating trade openness to growth, he arrives at estimates of the extent to which global poverty could be reduced over the next decade or two under alternative trade policy scenarios.
June 2004 • 344 pp.
ISBN paper 0-88132-365-9 • $29.95