Overview

Sam Laird and Santiago Fernández Córdoba

A chapter in Coping with Trade Reforms, 2006, pp 1-17 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract The trade negotiations launched at the World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial meeting in Doha in November 2001, which aim at further liberalization of trade in goods and services, hold out hopes for potentially important gains for developing countries in terms of improved access to overseas markets. Many of these countries are expected to undertake further liberalization commitments and this could bring them even further gains, at least in the longer term.1 However, while there might well be long-term gains from liberalization, liberalizing economies are, nevertheless, likely to face short- to medium-term adjustment costs. This is because, as economies open up, imports use existing channels while new exports often come from different sectors that have to gear up production and find new markets. The structural unemployment that occurs as this transition takes place is, perhaps, the major social cost of adjusting to trade reforms. Unfortunately, most developing countries do not have well-developed social safety nets, such as unemployment benefits, retraining programmes and portable pensions, to address these problems. Other areas of adjustment to be addressed include: the need to replace tariff revenues as a major source of government funding as protection is reduced; tackling the likely loss of preferences in overseas markets as MFN rates are lowered under multilateral liberalization; and intrasectoral and intersectoral reallocation of resources in response to changes in the levels of protection.

Keywords: Foreign Direct Investment; World Trade Organization; Trade Liberalization; Adjustment Cost; Much Favoured Nation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-37780-6_1

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9780230377806

DOI: 10.1057/9780230377806_1

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().