Suchergebnisse

U.S. President Donald Trump has imposed 30 percent tariffs (so-called safeguard tariffs) on solar panels made outside the United States. He has also imposed at a minimum of 20 percent and a maximum of 50 percent tariff on residential washing machines. Trump's current approach to trade was signaled late last year when the U.S. levied a staggering 292 percent tariff on C Series aircraft built by Bombardier Inc. In the past, he has been suggesting to scrap the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) deal. By putting up the tariffs, the Trump administration seems to be hopeful of making it easier for American companies (involved in domestic manufacturing) to compete with foreign manufacturers.

This paper presents a critical analysis of the SSG and a simulation of its effects for Brazilian sugar exports to countries such as the United States (US) and the European Union (EU) bloc. A first stage involved the identification of tariff lines (TL) for the EU and the US sugar imports from Brazil during the period of 1995 to 2013. Next, WTO notifications about SSGs were examined to identify when the measure was applied for sugar by these countries at each year, since 1995. For the years that the price-based SSG applied, the value of this additional tariff was calculated for each of the relevant TLs. This information was used, with price elasticities, to obtain the corresponding change in imports. Finally, the effect of an increase in Brazilian sugar exports in the absence of SSG tariffs was calculated and also the overall impact on Brazilian economy using its input-output matrix. The results indicated that the additional tariff due to SSG catch up 90% for raw sugar in EU and 30% for white sugar in US in years 1999 and 2002, which the additional tariffs were highest. In period of 2010-2013 the SSG did not work once the sugar price was higher than trigger price in both countries. The additional tariffs applied by EU were always higher than those applied by US. We estimated that the impact of the value of sugar that was not exported to the EU and US markets due to application of SSG tariffs in period 1995-2013 was equivalent to BRL 42 billion in the production value for all economy at 2013 prices (or US$ 20 billion) and almost BRL 22 billion in GDP for this country. This mean that Brazil has failed to produce, in this period, almost 0.8% of its GDP due to the application of this trade policy. Considering that the SSG price-based mechanism is particularly important when international market prices are low, these results suggest that the this policy intervention can be highly perverse as it translates into decreased domestic production in both, exporting and importing countries, and dampened world prices as the excess demand is restricted.

The SSM is a proposal from the G-33 Group in the Doha Round negotiations in which developing countries would be allowed to use contingent tariffs to control import surges of food commodities and/or downward spikes in their border prices. The principal objective is to safeguard the livelihood security of farm households in these countries. A stochastic partial equilibrium model of a typical importing country situation is specified in which there are either imperfectly competitive, domestic intermediaries or a parastatal. Using Monte Carlo simulation, it is found that the objective of the SSM is unlikely to be met.

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.

In the Doha Round of negotiations on agriculture it has been decided that all developing and least developed Member countries of the WTO will have access to a Special Safeguard Mechanism (SSM). This means that developing countries will now have the option to temporarily impose higher tariff rates on the import of an agricultural product if there is either a surge in its import volumes or a sharp dip in its import prices. However, the exact mechanisms of the implementation of SSMs have not been spelt out. It is also not clear what legal provisions the Member countries will have to follow to use this safeguard mechanism. This paper takes a detailed look at the SSM and analyzes its usefulness for developing countries. It also explores how the concept of a special agricultural safeguard has evolved in the present round of negotiations and what are the country positions on SSMs in the Doha Round. The paper then proposes a price-trigger-based SSM instrument which is consistent with the goals spelt out in the Doha Development Agenda and satisfies most of the desired features of a safeguard instrument.