The challenge of reducing international trade and migration barriers

Kym Anderson and L. Winters

No 4598, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: While barriers to trade in most goods and some services including capital flows have been reduced considerably over the past two decades, many remain. Such policies harm most the economies imposing them, but the worst of the merchandise barriers (in agriculture and textiles) are particularly harmful to the world's poorest people, as are barriers to worker migration across borders. This paper focuses on how costly those anti-poor trade policies are, and examines possible strategies to reduce remaining distortions. Two opportunities in particular are addressed: completing the Doha Development Agenda process at the World Trade Organization (WTO), and freeing up the international movement of workers. A review of the economic benefits and adjustment costs associated with these opportunities provides the foundation to undertake benefit/cost analysis required to rank this set of opportunities against those aimed at addressing the world's other key challenges as part of the Copenhagen Consensus project. The paper concludes with key caveats and suggests that taking up these opportunities could generate huge social benefit/cost ratios that are considerably higher than the direct economic ones quantified in this study, even without factoring in their contribution to alleviating several of the other challenges identified by that project, including malnutrition, disease, poor education and air pollution.

Keywords: Economic Theory&Research; Environmental Economics&Policies; Emerging Markets; Free Trade; Trade Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-04-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Related works:
Working Paper: The Challenge of Reducing International Trade and Migration Barriers (2009)
Working Paper: The Challenge of Reducing International Trade and Migration Barriers (2008)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:4598

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