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Trade-distorting Domestic Support: Alternatives for Product-specific Disciplines
Setting product-specific spending caps on agricultural subsidies based on how adversely they affect international prices would provide a means to reduce trade distortions caused by domestic support policies. The WTO cotton and sugar panels introduced two new parameters for product-specific agricultural subsidy disciplines. The first, particularly evident in the case of cotton, is that farm subsidies…
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Scaling Up Energy Efficiency: The Problem of Market Access
Energy consumption from end-use electric and electrical appliances account for a significant portion of emissions of carbon dioxide. The International Energy Agency estimates that were governments to implement the carbon reducing energy policies they are seriously considering, global CO2 emissions would be stabilised by 2030 and would be 16 percent lower than under the reference case.…
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Lexus vs Toyota: The Southern Africa-EU Trade Agreement
The European Union and its former colonies in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific are nearing the conclusion of new potentially far-reaching trading arrangements. For Africa, reaching the right outcome is vital. The Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) between the EU and six regional blocks of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group have been under negotiation…
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Duty-free Access for ACP Countries?
On 4 April, the European Commission unveiled an offer to remove tariffs and quotas on all exports from the African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) group of countries. Since 1975, ACP nations have benefited from preferential access to EU markets. Maintaining the non-reciprocal preferences has required a succession of waivers from the WTO’s mostfavoured- nation treatment principle.…
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Brazil Grants Compulsory License
Following in Thailand’s footsteps, Brazil has decided to override the patent on an AIDS drug in order to make it available under the country’s free treatment programme. On 4 May, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva signed a decree, which allows the government to import generic efavirenz from India rather than buy Stocrin – the brandname…
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New Trends in Technology Transfer
The character of technology transfer has changed profoundly over the last couple of decades. This has broad implications for defining policies that might benefit developing nations and, therefore, for international negotiations. In the technology transfer debate of the 1970s, the paradigm involved technology licensing from a multinational firm to a host-nation subsidiary, or licensee manufacturing…
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Facilitating Temporary Labour Mobility
Labour mobility has the potential to be a key driver of sustainable economic growth and development for many developing countries. Revenues generated by the remittances of nearly 200 million migrant workers amounted to approximately US$167 billion in 2005, over twice the value of official development assistance. For labour-receiving countries, there is also substantial evidence that…
- In Brief
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CTE Update
At an early-May negotiating session of the WTO Committee on Trade and Environment (CTE), Members considered a streamlined list of environmental goods slated for tariff cuts or elimination, based on proposals previously submitted by Canada, the EU, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Norway, Taiwan, Switzerland and the US. The revised list (JOB (7)/54) set out a reduced…
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News in Brief
The US and South Korea concluded a free trade agreement on 1 April, thus opening the door for congressional ratification before the president’s trade promotion authority expires on 30 June. Both countries made a major last-minute concession: the US agreed to leave rice out of the FTA, and Korea accepted to resume imports of US…