Trade

Trade provides important opportunities for developing countries to attract investment, create jobs, and reduce poverty. Rich country policies that are open to trade are critical in creating these opportunities. Unfortunately, support for open trade policies has eroded in recent years, particularly in the United States.

The Center's research on trade focuses on how rich country trade policies could be improved to make them more supportive of poverty reduction and economic growth in developing economies. In addition, education, outreach, and stakeholder coalition-building activities are designed to rebuild a foundation for broad support of open trade policies in key developed and emerging markets, including by easing the adjustment process for those dislocated by trade. Senior Fellow Kimberly Elliott leads this work.

Key areas of research include global trade negotiations at the World Trade Organization, especially agriculture, the implications of proliferating regional trade agreements for developing countries, the role of labor standards in trade agreements and development, and the need for greater coherence between trade and aid policies, especially in the areas of trade facilitation and capacity-building.

CGD publications on trade include Elliott's Delivering on Doha: Farm Trade and the Poor and her essay U.S. Trade Policy and Development (access the brief or download the full chapter) in The White House and the World: A Global Development Agenda for the Next U.S. President.

Reforming Trade Preferences Initiative

One important way that rich countries affect the trade opportunities available to developing countries is through unilateral trade preference programs. Encouraging preference-giving countries to jointly move in the direction of better and more coherent policies would significantly improve the effectiveness of preference programs as a development tool. To effectively contribute to development, trade preferences need to be available for products that developing countries commonly export, they need to be easy to use, they need to be permanent, and they need to be coordinated with funding for capacity building.

To identify effective and feasible reforms, CGD launched this initiative and organized the Global Trade Preferences Working Group to devise practical policy recommendations for high-income countries and emerging-market countries with new programs to improve and coordinate their trade preference programs in order to better serve development objectives.