— This paper explores tariff reform in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda between the early 1990s and early 2000s. Tariffs were reformed in an across the board manner consistent with implementing World Bank programs: the average tariff was reduced and the dispersion of tariffs was compressed, with the highest tariffs being eliminated. There is limited evidence of political economy influences ...

This paper addresses tariff revenue concerns that some countries have been expressing in the context of the current multilateral trade negotiations under the Doha Development Agenda. This paper: discusses methodological issues associated with estimating revenue impacts; provides impact estimates for a sample of developing countries; links the differences in impacts to cross-country differences ...

This paper makes a compelling case for public intervention for fostering industrial development. We have also summarized evidence that suggests that present day developed countries have extensively employed infant industry protection, industrial policy and performance requirements, soft intellectual property protection regimes, subsidies, government procurement and regional economic integration...

The inherent tension between trade preferences and the Most-Favoured Nation (MFN) principle has been mainly examined in the context of regional free trade agreements and customs unions. Much less attention has been given to non-reciprocal special trade preferences given by developed countries to developing countries. WTO rules on these special preferences are less explicit than WTO rules govern...

At present WTO member countries use a total of 1425 tariff rate quotas (TRQs) on agricultural products. The implementation of TRQs was envisaged, among other things, as a means to improve market access for developing countries’ exports. Since most of the developing countries are potentially large exporters of agricultural products and market access opportunities for exporters from developing co...

This article will question the legality of measures of environmental ‘conditionality’ in the Generalized System of Preferences [GSP] of the European Community [EC]. The GSP is a GATT/WTO authorized scheme which permits developed nations to grant non-reciprocal tariff preferences in favour of developing countries. The objectives of the GSP are primarily development-oriented in that it aims to in...

It has been argued that antidumping (AD) facilitates trade liberalization by serving as a release valve for protectionist pressure. We focus on a group of prominent ADusing developing countries and examine the validity of the pressure release hypothesis. The fact that these new AD users generally began using AD after significant trade liberalization supports the hypothesis. Yet, if pressure exi...

a r t i c l e i n f o The current literature suggests that tariff escalation (TE) lowers the competitiveness of processing sectors. Coffee and cotton are agricultural products that face the problem of TE in developing countries, where we observe low global coffee product export shares but high global cotton textile export shares, posing a question on TE's impact on competitiveness. This paper e...