The Working Group on Development and Environment in the Americas, founded in 2004, brings together economic researchers from several countries in the Americas who have carried out empirical studies of the social and environmental impacts of economic liberalization. The Working Group's goal is to contribute empirical research and policy analysis to the ongoing policy debates on national economic...

Devaluation has different effects on the structure of trade patterns in countries which have a fixed exchange rate regime. The experience of devaluation in many countries has clearly shown that devaluation policies have not always led to the improvement of their trade pattern structures. Some empirical studies have revealed that after employing devaluation, the real rate of money in some nation...

A common environmental externality of groundwater pumping is streamflow depletion. To manage impacts on hydrologically connected surface water systems, regulators often impose quotas, or allocations, limiting the rates extraction. Allocations vary in their temporal flexibility, ranging from single-year “hard caps” to multi-year “soft caps”. Soft cap allocations allow greater flexibility for far...

The Working Group on Development and Environment in the Americas, founded in 2004 under the initiative of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University, brings together economic researchers from several countries in the Americas who have carried out empirical studies of the social and environmental impacts of economic liberalization. The Working Group's goal is to contrib...

This paper explores the effects of general and agricultural trade openness on economic freedom and alongside with the quality of institutions, on income and poverty. Recent cross-country data for over 200 nations in global regions were used to estimate equations for income, poverty and economic freedom. Economic freedom appears to have positive impacts on income levels, which together with good...

How best to assess trade and industrial policy in developing countries is a controversial question that unlocks a host of modelling complexities. Large computable general-equilibrium (CGE) models dominate many economic policy debates, but recent developments in the field have demonstrated that it is by no means clear that they give reliable results to questions of how trade reforms affect the p...

This paper evaluates the impacts of increased economic integration with the United States in the wake of the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) against the backdrop of the " great free trade debate " of the late 1980s. Part One briefly summarizes the key issues raised in the debate, when proponents claimed that the FTA would boost long-term economic g...

It has been widely recognized in both the US and EU that in order to construct agricultural policy packages that are both politically sustainable and in compliance with the requirements of the World Trade Organization (WTO), it is necessary to incorporate environmental provisions into these packages. The goal of this proposal is to investigate and compare the trend toward melding agricultural a...