Agriculture and the World Trade Organization: Does Membership Make a Difference?

Jason Grant () and Kathryn Boys

No 90886, Working Papers from Canadian Agricultural Trade Policy Research Network

Abstract: Recent empirical studies have estimated the trade flow effect of membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). One important, although largely untested, conclusion from this literature is that the GATT/WTO has worked well if we ignore trade in agriculture – one of the institution’s seemingly apparent failures. This article investigates this conclusion using a large panel of agricultural and non-agricultural trade flows, the latter of which serves as our benchmark. The results are impressive: the multilateral institution has delivered significant positive effects on members’ agricultural trade relative to trade between non-members. Further, despite their special and differential treatment, membership has provided important trade flow benefits for developing and least-developed country agricultural exports. These findings are robust across a large number of specifications and slices of the data. Although there are few sectors as politically sensitive, participation in the GATT/WTO appears to be a significant determinant of agricultural trade flows.

Keywords: Agricultural and Food Policy; International Development; International Relations/Trade; Political Economy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30
Date: 2010-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/90886/files/Working_Paper_2010-3_Grant.pdf (application/pdf)

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:ags:catpwp:90886

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.90886

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Canadian Agricultural Trade Policy Research Network Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().