<p> </p><p>Indonesia, Malaysia, The Philippines, and Thailand, have all chosen outward-oriented strat-egy over inward-oriented strategy to gain economic growth. This approach was due to the Asian miracles development. Therefore, protectionism had to cave in (Edwards, 1993).</p><p>This thesis aim with the help of income terms of trade and GDP_{CAP to study the relation between trade and growth for these countries mentioned. Therefore, see if income terms of trade would work as an engine of growth for these countries. The purpose is to find a posi-tive correlation between the variables. ITT capture the price and volume effects when trade increases. That is why, ITT is used in this thesis, for the purpose that exports alone cannot explain growth if imports are left out.}</p><p>Time series was conducted with help of a unit root test, co-integration, and Granger causal-ity test. In each test made, the result provided showed of statistically significant values, hence, ITT is of relevance for growth in these countries, during 1980-2006.</p><p> </p><p> </p>

Standards are necessary for an efficient functioning of the market and their regulation is an increasingly important area of law. Such is their importance that today it is possible to find thousands of standards developed by international standardising bodies, governmental agencies and even private companies in products that range from SIM cards and medical devices, to the pasteurisation of milk and computer protocols. Reasons that justify their widespread use are not difficult to ascertain: they play, for example, an important role in the achievement of economies of scale in manufacturing and in the attainment of compatibility of products and processes. However, together with these positive effects, standards can also have discriminatory consequences for trading partners, especially in cases in which they are badly designed and applied (for example, when they are introduced with the real purpose of creating an artificial comparative advantage for domestic producers). Given the existence of these ambivalent effects, three different policy tools have been developed within the World Trade Organisation (WTO) legal regime, aimed at maximising the benefits derived from the use of standards: harmonisation, equivalence and mutual recognition. The present thesis investigates the way in which both the WTO Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) and Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS) Agreements regulate these three instruments, and also, the potential shortcomings of the system from a trade law perspective. For that purpose, it studies relevant legal provisions of both Agreements, WTO jurisprudence and guidelines issued by international standardising bodies, among other topics.

M.A. / International markets have expanded through the global reduction of protectionist policies, such as tariffs and quotas, which has in turn expanded international trade between states. The reduction of trade barriers and the implementation of trade liberalisation have caused the international trade structure to change; resources are shifting away from traditional industries and into new ones resulting in new trade opportunities and trade-offs. However, the gains from increased international trade have been unequal; some states, mainly the industrialised, developed nations and the East Asian economies, have reaped the benefits from an increasingly integrated trading system. Numerous developing countries have actively reduced their barriers to international trade and have attempted to integrate their economies into the international trading system. Nevertheless, many of these developing countries are highly impoverished and uncompetitive in the global economy. Within this context, it is the purpose of this dissertation to determine with greater clarity why certain developing countries have significantly decreased their barriers to international trade but have not benefited, both politically and economically, from these actions. In other words, why have certain developing countries, such as those in Latin America, the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia and Africa, increased their trade liberalisation but not benefited from this increased openness. Additionally, why have other developing states, such as the East Asian economies, become key competitors within the global economy? In short, this study investigates why some developing countries trade more yet earn less. The examination of developing countries within the international trading system is presented in a theoretical perspective constructed with a focus on the three classic international relations theories, namely realism, liberalism and structuralism. Each of these theories is employed descriptively as well as prescriptively as tools to evaluate the nature of the international trading system as well as the positioning of developing countries within the trading regime. Applying these prisms of reality, certain developing countries’ position in the global economy are assessed and evaluated through an examination of the WTO and developing countries, the implementation of import substitution policies and export-led industrialisation strategies by various developing countries and the international trends that have caused various developing countries to be uncompetitive in the global trading regime.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, School of Law / The research is divided in seven sections where the problem of the interpretation and applicability of Art XXIII GATT to the Laws and Practices under the Anti-Dumping Agreement is examined. Chapter I identifies the problems, raises the research question and gives an overview of the current state of the matters under observation. In Chapter II the general theory of interpretation is studied and subsequently applied to Art XXIII specifically, taking into account the meaning, scope, historical evolution and current interpretations of Art XXIII. Chapter III revises the theory of coherent interpretation of Art XXIII in connection with the Anti-Dumping Agreement specifically. The constitutional structure and principles of the WTO are questioned, dissected and supported to decant a handful of fundamental principles which shall inform the rest of the interpretation applied in the research. This chapter takes the interpretation from an abstract perspective to a material view of a coherent interpretation of both Art. XXIII and the Anti-Dumping Agreement. Chapter IV revises the facts, laws and practices of Anti-Dumping being used as a protectionist measure in disguise both using procedural and substantial arguments which are illustrated in the laws and practices of seven countries. The findings in Chapter IV lead to Chapter V which questions the legitimacy and validity of considering the possible applicability of Art XXIII to the anti-Dumping Agreement as it is currently implemented by the WTO membership. Those reflections lead to the consideration and mention of Competition as a public good in international trade in Chapter VI, which is a key element for the final findings of this research. The conclusion of this research is inclined to suggest that in order to keep the legal system of the WTO functional, a stronger economic constitutional approach that allows for the application of art XXIII in situations subversive to the principles of free trade is necessary. The adaptation of a theory of an economic constitution is proposed.

This dissertation examines the material culture of the Sino-British furniture trade in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the beginning of the eighteenth century, the British East India Company began importing a large quantity of furniture made in Canton (Guangzhou), China. As the trade between Britain and China became standardized around 1720, this furniture became a part of the private trade carried out by merchants associated with Company. Unlike other objects of the China trade that fed into the vogue of chinoiserie, export furniture crafted with hardwoods from the Indian Ocean was produced in European designs of the time and thus was often indistinguishable from its Western counterparts. What cultural and economic values did export furniture represent in the early modern maritime trade and how did it reify the trans-regional movement of knowledge and taste between China and Britain? Going beyond the conventional perspective on export Chinese objects oriented toward European reception, I connect production with consumption in order to follow the trajectory of export furniture from its origins in the intra-Asian timber trade to its requisition and manufacture in Canton to its reception and use in both Britain and China, highlighting how this process linked the disparate spheres of commerce, knowledge production and distribution, and cultural practices. In the course of exploring these multiple dimensions of the object’s material life, this dissertation underscores export furniture’s bicultural and transcultural characteristics. Utilizing diverse sets of visual, material, and textual sources, each chapter of the dissertation investigates different aspects of the movement of furniture as an assemblage. Chapter 1 reconstructs the itinerary of export furniture as a commodity from the EIC timber trade between India and China to the ordering and shipping of the furniture for the British market. I show how the character of export furniture was shaped by the constraints of space and the economic, environmental, and epistemic contingencies of long distance travel and communication. Chapter 2 examines the influence of imported Asian rosewood – an important cabinet timber from which most hardwood Chinese export furniture was made – on early modern British arboreal knowledge. If the knowledge of rosewood in the seventeenth century was grounded in classical texts that defined it as a subshrub growing in the eastern Mediterranean region, in the eighteenth century the term came to refer to a hardwood species imported from tropical Asia. I argue that this change allowed rosewood to obtain a new status as a universal category in the botanical taxonomy, which collected, pruned, and ordered heterogeneous cultural and natural information associated with it into a neatly classified “cabinet” of universal knowledge. Chapter 3 returns to Canton to investigate Cantonese cabinetmakers and the production of export furniture. By reading the joinery of extant export furniture pieces, I show how Chinese artisans recreated foreign forms by mobilizing their embodied knowledge of craft rather than by imitating European joinery constructions. The details of this material translation not only reflect the flexibility and resilience of traditional Chinese craft but also illuminate the tacit knowledge and craft patterns of early modern Chinese artisans. Chapters 4 and 5 turn to the domain of consumption in Britain and China, respectively. Chapter 4 explores how Chinese cabinets were experienced in early modern Britain. Comparing lacquered and hardwood display cabinets, I show that Chinese cabinets were not just exotic objects; they played an active role in the evolution of the cabinet as a type of furniture in the domestic material culture and created an affective space both within themselves and in their ambient space that invited the bodily experience and imagination of the user-beholder. The final chapter examines the movement and adaptation of European round tables in mid-Qing Chinese material culture. Introduced by European mariners to Canton, the round tables quickly found their niche in local everyday life and eventually spread beyond Guangdong. I show how they partook in the formation of a new social dining practice that conveyed a new political vision of equality. As a whole, my dissertation argues that export furniture was a Eurasian object that embodied cross-cultural knowledge of craft and nature, and engendered new ideas of utility and sociability.

No description available.

Many trade and development economists, policy makers and policy analysts around the world believe that globalisation promotes growth and reduces poverty. There exists a large body of theoretical and empirical literature on how trade liberalisation helps to promote growth and reduce poverty. However, critics of globalisation argue that, in developing countries, integration into the world economy makes the poor poorer and the rich richer. The most common criticism of globalisation is that it increases poverty and inequality. Much of the research related to the link between openness, growth and poverty has been based on cross-country regressions. Dollar and Kraay (2000; 2001), using regression analysis, argue that growth is pro poor. Moreover, their study suggests that growth does not affect distribution and poor as well as rich could benefit from it. Later, they demonstrate that openness to international trade stimulates rapid growth, thus linking trade liberalisation with improvements in wellbeing of the poor. Several other cross-country studies demonstrate a positive relationship between trade openness and economic growth (see for example Dollar, 1992; Sach and Warner, 1995 and Edward, 1998). In contrast, Rodriguez and Rodrik (2001) question the measurements related to trade openness in economic models, and suggest that generalisations cannot be made regarding the relationship between trade openness and growth. Several other studies also criticise the pro poor growth argument based upon the claim of weak econometrics and place more focus on the distributional aspect (see, for example, Rodrik, 2000). Ultimately, openness and growth have therefore become an empirical matter, and so has the relationship between trade and poverty. These weaknesses of cross-country studies have led to a need to provide evidence from case studies. Systematic case studies related to individual countries will at least complement cross-country studies such as that of Dollar and Kraay. As Chen and Ravallion (2004, p.30) argue, 'aggregate inequality or poverty may not change with trade reform even though there are gainers and losers at all levels of living'. They further argue that policy analysis which simply averages across diversities may miss important matters that are critical to the policy debate. In this study, Sri Lanka is used as a case study and a computable general equilibrium (CGE) approach is adopted as an analytical framework. Sri Lanka was selected as an interesting case in point to investigate this linkage for the following reasons: although Sri Lanka was the first country in the South Asian region to liberalise its trade substantially in the late seventies, it still experiences an incidence of poverty of a sizeable proportion that cannot be totally attributed to the long-standing civil conflict. Moreover, trade poverty linkage within the Sri Lankan context has hardly received any attention, while multi-sectoral general equilibrium poverty analysis within the Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) based CGE model has never been attempted. In order to examine the link between globalisation and poverty, a poverty focussed CGE model for the Sri Lankan economy has been developed in this study. As a requirement for the development of such a model, a SAM of the Sri Lankan economy for the year 1995 has been constructed. Moreover, in order to estimate the intra group income distribution in addition to the inter group income distribution, income distribution functional forms for different household groups have been empirically estimated and linked to the CGE model in 'top down' mode: this will compute a wide range of household level poverty and inequality measurements. This is a significant departure from the traditional representative agent hypothesis used to specifying household income distributions. Furthermore, as the general equilibrium framework permits endogenised prices, an attempt was made to endogenise the change in money metric poverty line within the CGE model. Finally, a set of simulation experiments was conducted to identify the impacts of trade liberalisation in manufacturing and agricultural industries on absolute and relative poverty at household level. The results show that, in the short run, trade liberalisation of manufacturing industries increases economic growth and reduces absolute poverty in low-income household groups. However, it is observed that the potential benefits accruing to the rural low-income group are relatively low compared to other two low-income groups. Reduction in the flow of government transfers to households following the loss of tariff revenue may be blamed for this trend. In contrast, long run results indicate that trade liberalisation reduces absolute poverty in substantial proportion in all groups. It further reveals that, in the long run, liberalisation of the manufacturing industries is more pro poor than that of the agricultural industries. Overall simulation results suggest that trade reforms may widen the income gap between the rich and the poor, thus promoting relative poverty. This may warrant active interventions with respect to poverty alleviation activities following trade policy reforms.

In the last twenty years, regional trade agreements have proliferated. These have usually taken the form of customs unions (CUs) or free trade areas (FTAs). This thesis concentrates mostly on the formation and behaviour of CUs. Union members levy a common external tariff (CET) on non-members. Existing theoretical models, however, do not agree on how the CET rate is chosen. Every model imposes a different choice rule exogenously. In this thesis, for the first time, plausible choice rules, based on the CU's social welfare function, are derived endogenously. The strategic behaviour of members and non-members, reveals that responsibility for CET choice tends to be assumed by the member that can induce the rest of the world to levy those tariffs members prefer to face. Relatively few general results exist describing the relationship between country characteristics and trade bloc formation. Here, new light is shed on this issue, by systematically analysing bloc formation in an asymmetric world, and investigating the role of preferences in coalition formation. It is found that global free trade is most likely to arise when all countries are similar. Customs unions tend to form between relatively well-endowed countries or those with similar preferences. It is also demonstrated that CUs will usually Pareto dominate FTAs, except where preferences differ significantly. The role of transfers in CU formation has received relatively little attention in the regionalism literature. In this thesis, optimal intra-union transfers are introduced and their impact on CET choice is investigated. The impact of transfers on CU behaviour depends on the direction of the transfer. When the relatively inelastic member is the recipient, the CU responds less aggressively to non-member tariff choices than it does when transfers are not permitted. However, if the relatively elastic member is the transfer recipient, the union's aggression increases. Moreover, when one union member exercises a similar degree of control over both CET and transfer choice, then the equilibrium CET tends to be lower than in the corresponding no-transfers situation.

Thesis (M.Bus)--Unitec New Zealand, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 96-101)

<p>Background: A large part of the daily political and economic debate in Sweden concerns the EU. One question that has been debated since the beginning of European integration is whether trade is created as a consequence of integration and, ifso, how great are the gains related to the increased trade. An equally important but maybe less debated question is whether countries outside the union are affected by the increased European integration. Is increased European integration made at the cost of countries outside the EU? </p><p>Purpose: The purpose of this study is, by calculating trade creation and trade diversion, to evaluate if a number of developing countries’ trade with Sweden has decreased after Sweden’s membership in the European Union. </p><p>Limitations: The study is limited to the years 1990-1999, and not all developing countries are included in the study. All developed countries are also omitted from the study. </p><p>Method: The empirical material consists of calculations of consumption shares for Sweden, partner countries and third countries. The method is called residual imputation, meaning that the actual evolution of the trade is compared with a hypothetical, calculated one. These calculations where made for three groups of countries, divided after GDP/capita. </p><p>Conclusions: On the aggregated level, and for the two least poor groups of countries, there is no evidence that these countries have seen their shares decreased as a consequence of Sweden entering the EU. The poorest group of countries has, however, not been able to maintain the same level of exports to Sweden after the membership.</p>