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Trade
Trade is an important driver of economic growth around the world. CGD’s research focuses on how trade policies can support poverty reduction and economic growth in developing economies by promoting market access that opens the door to foreign investment and job creation.
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Sugar is a prototypical case of a policy that favors the few at the expense of the many. Thanks to a government policy that supports prices by sharply restricting imports, a small number of American sugar cane and beet growers are enriched at the expense of US consumers and of more efficient foreign growers, most of whom are in poorer developing countries.
In this brief we focus on potential disruptions in poor countries and the policy priorities for coping with them. In particular, we recommend that the United States, which is the only rich country that does not grant tariff-free access for imports from all least-developed countries, provide this access as quickly as possible. In addition, to take advantage of any resulting opportunities, beneficiary countries must adopt domestic reforms to encourage greater productivity.
This paper examines arguments in favor and against the of patent rights on pharmaceuticals in the developing world as required by World Trade Organization membership. It emphasizes that these new pharmaceutical patents promise benefits and costs that differ with the characteristics of diseases. It also considers standard intellectual property and regulatory mechanisms that could be used to differentiate protection, and concludes that all have serious drawbacks. It then describes a new mechanism that would make differentiating protection a more feasible policy option.
In this paper we argue that neither the level nor the change in a country's trade/GDP ratio can be taken as an indication of the "openness" of a country's trade policy. In particular, we examine the ways in which terms of trade shifts have affected trade/GDP ratio over the past two decades, and find that the empirical evidence offered by the existing literature overstates the importance of trade policy in economic growth.
This study develops an index of trade policy designed to synthesize the state of developing country access to import markets in each of the major industrial country areas.
I suggest in this paper the logic of going beyond the standard, poverty-targeted, elements of good social policy to a modern social contract adapted to the demands and the constraints of an open economy. Such a contract would be explicitly based on broad job-based growth. Second, it would be politically and economically directed not only at the currently poor but at the near-poor and economically insecure middle-income strata.
We use a public economics framework to consider how pharmaceuticals should be priced when at least some of the R&D incentive comes from sales revenues. We employ familiar techniques of public finance to relax some of the restrictions implied in the standard use of Ramsey pricing. We use this framework to examine on-going debates regarding the international patent system as embodied in the WTO's TRIPS agreement.
This paper re-examines the evidence linking poor growth during the era of import substituting industialization with trade restrictions.
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