Suchergebnisse

This guide to the WTO Customs Valuation Agreement is based on the authors' experiences of teaching its finer points to customs officials and policy-makers around the world. Covering the methods of valuation and the provisions on enforcement, implementation and dispute settlement, the authors give practical examples, explain interpretative decisions of national and international customs bodies, and analyse the history of its negotiation. Written as a learning tool, it helps both new and experienced policy-makers, customs officials, importers and exporters to gain a deeper understanding of the Agreement's function and aims

India's accession to the WTO in 1995 brought a new set of challenges for its agriculture. Most of the policies supporting agriculture, especially price support and input subsidies, labelled by the agreement on agriculture (AoA) as domestic support measures, were under the scanner. The price support measure that India uses, namely, the minimum support price (MSP) provided to most of the major crops now faces a problem as the methodology of calculating the extent of subsidies on account of MSP is working against India. Further, the AoA prevents India from using export subsidies since it was not using this instrument in the past. But the agreement allows the advanced countries that were using export subsidies to continue using this instrument, albeit at a lower level. Equally problematic for India is the fact that AoA rules are constraining the implementation of the National Food Security Act, which provides subsidised foodgrains to the disadvantaged sections. JEL codes: F13, Q17, Q18

This study focuses on evaluating the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) Article XIX, the World Trade Organization's (WTO) Agreement on Safeguards (AoS), and the Dispute Settlement Procedure (DSP) for the safeguards by developing a theoretical model. To make a fair comparison, we analyse the timing of the DSP, the political ties between the safeguard imposing country and the countries whose exports are affected from these duties, ex-ante against interim safeguard tariffs, and we present respective extensions over the model initially developed Beshkar (2009). For this purpose, a model design is introduced for GATT, WTO, and DSP to find the incentive- compatible agreement that maximizes political welfare under the AoS, aiming to extend Beshkar's analyses. We find that determining the safeguard tariff level at an interim step instead of ex-ante leads to the tariff that is politically the best for a country at that instant but does not necessarily lead to an optimal tariff. As a result, we reveal that WTO procedures do not always produce the best tariff options for the parties in safeguard measures.

This study seeks to examine the impact of the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) of the World Trade Organization (WTO) on the balance of agricultural trade of South Asian countries (SAC). The evidence suggests that AoA has failed to boost the SAC farm trade surplus. SAC, as a whole, are net losers in new trade regime. Further, analysis indicates that under the WTO regime, openness of Indian, Sri Lankan and Bangladeshi agriculture has increased. In sharp contrast, Pakistan's agricultural economy has been gradually closed up. The need of SAC is to designate their food items as special products and to create an effective and proactive special safeguard mechanism for safeguarding their food security base, in order to shield the livelihood of millions of resource poor farmers from frequent farm imports surges.