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In recent years, China’s influence as the dominant importer of waste products has reshaped global waste trade through restrictive programs such as Operation Green Fence in 2013 and National Sword in 2017. These restrictions have greatly affected not only China’s import of waste products but also the international trade and global logistics of these products. China’s import restrictions in 2017 decreased the country’s import of waste plastic by 92% and used paper by 56%. It also increased the unit value of these two categories of waste by 27% and 13%, respectively, showing an improvement in the quality of imported waste. Most of these impacts originate from intensive margins. The restrictions diverted the flow of waste mostly to the low- and middle-income countries of the East Asian and Pacific regions along with Europe and Central Asia, as their imports increased by 161% and 266% for waste plastic and 101% and 77% for used paper, respectively. Compared with Operation Green Fence, the impact of the 2017 National Sword has been much higher, with shipping companies faced with a lack of products on backhaul routes and forced to change their longstanding practices.

Regulation (EU) 2019/880 of the European Parliament and of the Council assigned implementing powers to the European Commission to adopt uniform provisions for effectively enforcing new rules on the import of cultural goods. The present commentary navigates the text of the Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2021/1079 of 24 June 2021 (“Implementing Regulation”), adopted to ensure the uniform implementation of the said import legislation by the Member States. The text of the Committee’s instrument sets up exemptions from the documentation requirements for certain categories of goods; contains detailed provisions on import licenses and statements; and establishes rules for the electronic system for the import of cultural goods. The ambitious provisions of the Implementing Regulation raise some important questions, e.g. whether the electronic system will facilitate the work of custom agents or engulf it; or whether national export offices and legislative bodies will step up to the challenge and quickly adapt to the new system and new rules.

The WTO allows its members to retaliate in the face of continued non-compliance. After more than ten years' operation and ten arbitration disputes, this volume assesses the law, economics and politics of trade sanctions in WTO dispute settlement. Including more than thirty contributions from leading academics, trade diplomats and practitioners, it offers a thorough analysis of the legal rules on permissible WTO retaliation as well as an assessment of the economic rationale and calculations behind the mechanism. In addition, it provides first hand experiences of those countries that have obtained WTO authorisation to retaliate, ranging from the United States and the EC to Mexico and Antigua. In this assessment, the question of how to make the system work also for small countries is paramount. Finally, the volume spells out lessons that could be learned from related fields such as remedies for non-compliance in investment arbitration and competition or anti-trust regimes.

This paper examines the theory underpinning the design of optimal tariffs in a developing economy, and the experience of implementation of tariff reforms. A central issue is whether and when a case can be made for a uniform tariff structure. While theory advocates a differentiated tariff structure (except under a balance of payments objective), political economy considerations, inadequate information, and administrative convenience point to a minimally differentiated tariff structure. The experience of reform indicates that tariff structures are mainly influenced by income distribution and protection objectives. The ability to successfully reduce tariffs depends on measures taken to alleviate fiscal and balance of payments constraints.

As tariffs have fallen worldwide, the increasing importance of non-tariff policies for further trade liberalization has become widely recognized. The methods for assessing the potential effects of such liberalization have lagged significantly behind those available for analyzing tariffs. This book is the first volume that comprehensively addresses this gap. It has been designed to be useful for both economists and policymakers, especially for those involved in communicating ideas and results between economists and policymakers. This indispensable book contains cutting-edge discussions of the full range of methodologies used in this area, including business surveys, summary statistics such as effective rates of protection and price gaps, time-series and panel econometrics, and simulation methods such as computable general equilibrium. It covers the entire spectrum of policies under discussion in current trade negotiations, including trade facilitation, services policies, quantitative measures, customs procedures, standards, movement of natural persons, and anti-dumping. Some prominent contributors to this book are Bijit Bora (World Trade Organization), John Wilson, Tsunehiro Otsuki and Vlad Manole (World Bank), Catherine Mann (Institute of International Economics), Alan Deardorff and Robert Stern (University of Michigan), Joe Francois (Erasmus University), Dean Spinanger (University of Kiel), Antoni Estevadeordal and Kati Suominen (Inter-American Development Bank), Thomas Prusa (Rutgers University), Thomas Hertel and Terrie Walmsley (Purdue University), Scott Bradford (Brigham Young University), Judith Dean, Robert Feinberg, Soamiely Andriamananjara and Marinos Tsigas (US International Trade Commission).

Until the 1990s, the main users of safeguards and antidumping laws were Australia, Canada, the European Union, and the United States. Since then, many countries have implemented such laws, leading to a proliferation in antidumping and safeguard activity across the world. This timely book documents the political economy surrounding the implementation of these laws in seven Latin American countries and provides details on the institutions created, implementation of the laws, and subsequent activity. It finds that, in the larger political context, antidumping and safeguards are a necessary quid pro quo to certain important sectors to obtain much more liberalized trade policies for the general economy.

Widespread shortages in key inputs are common in mixed economies of developing countries. These shortages appear to occur at the same time that relatively high rates of capacity underutilization in manufacturing industries are observed. This paper develops a simple model which explains the existence of excess capacity when there are quantitative restrictions on key inputs. This model is tested using data for manufacturing industries in India, and the results indicate that shortages in domestic rather than imported inputs imposed binding constraints on capacity utilization rates.

The global textile and apparel sector is critically important as an early phase in industrialization for many developing countries and as a provider of employment opportunities to thousands of low-income workers, many of them women. The goal of this book is to explore how the lifting of the Multi-fibre Arrangement/ Agreement on Textiles and Clothing (MFA/ATC) quotas has affected nine countries Bangladesh, Cambodia, Honduras, India, Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam with the broader aim of better understanding the links between globalization and poverty in the developing world. Analyzing how employment, wage premiums, and the structure of the apparel industry have changed after the MFA/ATC can generate important lessons for policy makers for economic development and poverty reduction. This book uses in-depth country case studies as the broad methodological approach. In-depth country studies are important because countries are idiosyncratic: differences in regulatory context, history, location, trade relationships, and policies shape both the apparel sector and how the apparel sector changed after the end of the MFA. In-depth country studies place broader empirical work in context and strengthen the conclusions. The countries in this book were chosen because they represent the diversity of global apparel production, including differences across regions, income levels, trade relationships, and policies. The countries occupy different places in the global value chain that now characterizes apparel production. Not surprisingly, the countries studied in this book represent the diversity of post-MFA experiences. This book highlights four key findings: The first is that employment and export patterns after the MFA/ATC did not necessarily match predictions. This book shows that only about a third of the variation in cross-country changes in exports is explained by wage differences. While wage differences explain some of the production shifts, domestic policies targeting the apparel sector, ownership type, and functional upgrading of the industry also played an important role. Second, changes in exports are usually, but not always, good indicators of what happens to wages and employment. While rising apparel exports correlated with rising wages and employment in the large Asian countries, rising exports coincided with falling employment in Sri Lanka. Third, this book identifies the specific ways that changes in the global apparel market affected worker earnings, thus helping to explain impacts on poverty. Fourth, in terms of policies, the countries that had larger increases in apparel exports were those that promoted apparel sector upgrading; those that did not promote upgrading had smaller increases or even falling exports.

Although the circumstances in which Kenyan firms must do business have improved since 2004, including an increase in productivity, Kenyan firms still face an adverse business environment. 'An Assessment of the Investment Climate in Kenya' reports on the main impediments to productivity growth identified by managers of Kenyan businesses: -- Lack of access to financing. Despite a favorable lending regime, 90 percent of microenterprises and 60 percent of small firms in Kenya declared that they needed loans, compared to 40 percent of medium-sized and large firms. -- Corruption and crime. Seventy-five percent of firms in Kenya reported having to make informal payments to 'get things done'. This sort of corruption costs Kenyan firms approximately 4 percent of annual sales. In 2007, approximately one-third of Kenyan managers rated crime as a major business constraint. In addition, Kenyan companies lose 2.6 percent of their sales because of spoilage and theft during transportation. -- Unreliable infrastructure services. Transportation and energy remain significant bottlenecks. Close to 80 percent of firms in Kenya experience losses because of power interruptions. As a consequence, almost 70 percent of firms have generators, which are costly to obtain and operate. Managers also complained about taxes. Kenya has reduced corporate tax rates in recent years, but some objective indicators suggest that the country's tax burden remains higher than in most comparator countries. Given the potential impacts of high taxes—high evasion and the presence of a large informal economic sector—the report recommends a more detailed assessment of the effective rate of taxation. 'An Assessment of the Investment Climate in Kenya' recommends specific changes in each of these areas of constraint, as well as in the areas of transportation and regulatory reform. The book will be of interest to readers working in business and finance, economic policy, corproate governance, and poverty reduction.