News: Working Papers
Desktop analysis of agricultural subsidies and environmental impacts
WORKING PAPER 10
There is broad agreement that much of the government support provided to agriculture today is environmentally harmful. This report explores the impacts of production and trade-distorting domestic support in agriculture on climate (i.e., greenhouse gas emissions) and the environment (i.e., water, biodiversity, and land degradation). Global reform is needed, however agriculture is a highly sensitive sector, one that is crucial for national food security. Gaining momentum for policy change can be difficult. Successful policy reform requires coalition building. A sustained evidence-based networking initiative that incorporates active public engagement and global coalition building should be developed on a priority basis.
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Improving border adjustment mechanisms
WORKING PAPER 09
Despite several attempts and significant progress, broad agreement on the most appropriate way to manage conflicts between international trade and environmental issues has yet to emerge. Consequently, this paper begins with a search for a set of principles to guide the use of border adjustment mechanisms to ameliorate global environmental problems or, as economists call them, global externalities.
Ten principles are developed, and then applied to the European Union's current CBAM design, and recommendations for improving that design are put forward. As this CBAM is rooted in the EU's Emissions Trading System, broad recommendations for aligning the ETS with the principles are also offered.
How China challenges the liberal trade order: Coercion, contestation and the socialist market economy.
WORIKING PAPER 08
The original China ‘engagement strategy’ was grounded in the assumption that WTO membership would turn China into a liberal market economy. Today the engagement strategy is acknowledged as having failed by China’s largest trading partners, who increasingly view Beijing as a systemic rival. Yet, much international economics still views the engagement strategy as a viable approach for driving liberal reforms within China, indicating a growing gap between political thinking and international economics. This paper addresses that gap, arguing there are theoretical and empirical grounds that support viewing China as a rival economic system that will increasingly challenge core aspects of the existing liberal trade order.
Strengthening African Agricultural Trade: The Case For Domestic Support Entitlement Reforms
WORKING PAPER 07
Reform of domestic agriculture support in the form of financial subsidies has long been a vexed issue. One relatively promising area for reform is to address WTO members’ entitlements to deploy domestic support, rather than aiming to cut actual expenditures per se. Specifically, reducing entitlements would diminish members’ rights to increase domestic support payments in future. Such reductions are best targeted at those subsidies that distort trading partners’ production and trade incentives, rather than at subsidies generally regarded as either relatively benign, or minimally distorting to support domestic farmers and the agricultural economy.
Trade, Technology and Security: Exploring the Linkages.
WORKING PAPER 06
Over the past decade China has developed into a technological competitor during a period of increased geopolitical tensions with its major trading partners. This has resulted in increasing securitization of trade and technology as well as growing techno-nationalism. This working paper explores the linkages between trade, technology and security, focusing on application of national security provisions, how the latter are justified or in breach of existing international trade rules, and potential solutions for balancing the multilateral principle of non-discrimination with the imperative of upholding national security.
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Rethinking special and differential treatment in the World Trade Organization
WORKING PAPER 05
The overarching principle of SDT is encapsulated in paragraph 1 of the preamble to the Marrakesh Agreement (1994), establishing the WTO and specifying its functions. The WTO Secretariat lists 155 SDT provisions in the WTO Agreements. Development issues have been dealt with in the WTO for over sixty-years in subsequent ‘Trade Rounds’ and have concluded with varying degrees of success.
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Economic Coercion by China: The impact on Australia's merchandise exports
WORKING PAPER 04
Australia is estimated to have foregone export revenue of around US$4.9 billion (A$6.6 billion) over July 2020 to February 2021 as a result of China’s restrictions or discriminatory purchasing affecting eight key commodities – coal, copper ores and concentrates, frozen beef, wine, cotton, barley, rough wood and rock lobster.
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Industrial Subsidies and their impacts on exports of trading partners: The China Case
WORKING PAPER 03
This paper explores the impact of Chinese subsidy interventions in the upstream sector on the competitiveness of the downstream sector. In particular, the paper investigates the effect of Chinese subsidies on basic metal products on the export competitiveness of downstream sectors in other major trading countries. To explore the impact of base metal subsidies interventions on the downstream sector of a trading partner, we exploit both temporal variation in subsidy interventions and in base-metal consumption by the downstream sector.
Morphing Risks to Australia’s Goods Trade with China
WORKING PAPER 02
At the start of 2020, the US-China Economic and Trade Agreement (the Phase One Agreement or Agreement) captured the attention of Australian policy makers and business. China had agreed to substantially increase goods imports from the United States in 2020 and 2021 and to accept certain US standards and conformity assessment procedures to assist US companies to access Chinese agricultural markets.
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Industrial Subsidies, market competition, global trade and investment: Towards a research agenda
Subsidization by states of their domestic industries to gain competitive advantage abroad is a perennial topic in international trade discussions. As the world moves into a multipolar environment and China rises in economic prominence, the rules governing subsidies, particularly to the industrial sector, are in the spotlight.
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