The US Farm Bill of 2002 is the latest in a 7-decade history of farm subsidy laws that transfer funds to farmers and regulate and subsidize production of selected commodities. Fruit, tree nut, ornamental and vegetable crops, hay and meats remain outside scope of main subsidy programs. The new law continues many innovations of the 1996 Act, such as removal of authority for annual land idling and...

Biographical notes: Jayashree Watal is a Fellow of the Indian Council for Research in International Economic Research, New Delhi, and Visiting Fellow of the Institute for International Economics, Washington DC. She was Director, Trade Policy Division, Ministry of Commerce, New Delhi. Watal was responsible for TRIPS negotiations in the Uruguay Round from 1989-91. She has recently completed a com...

This paper examines the reform outcome of the Uruguay Round relating to trade in agriculture, the nature of the unfinished reform agenda and policy choices for the Doha Round, with special emphasis on the position of developing in trade negotiations. A key policy inference is that, to be effective, agricultural trade liberalisation should involve simultaneous reforms of the trade regime and dom...

We offer a psychological perspective to explain the failure of governments to create near-Pareto improvements. Our tools for analyzing these failures reflect the difficulties people have trading small losses for large gains: the fixed-pie approach to negotiations, the omission bias and status quo bias, parochialism and dysfunctional competition, and the neglect of secondary effects. We examine ...

The EU has long been a global power in the world economy and in international economic policy-making. The EU is the largest trader in the world economy; in 2005, its external merchandise trade equalled about $ 2,790 bill., with a rather well balanced position: the external deficit of the EU came to about $ 134 bill. 1 In the same year, the US total merchandise trade came to about $ 2,637 bill. ...

Note: This paper is preliminary work for my dissertation. In this paper I set out the framework of my argument giving hypotheses and describing independent variables and expectations for evidence which would confirm or deny my theory. I give a brief discussion of some results from one part of the quantitative section for US-Japan negotiations. In the coming months I will be adding further data ...

There is a crisis in multilateralism.  No major new binding rules relating to international commerce have come into force in more than 20 years.  Demands by some nations for rules in new areas are not being met. The negotiations in the WTO of trade rules and the negotiations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to devise rules restricting the annual emissions of greenhouse ga...

G the hotly contested U.S. presidential election and the surprising victory of Donald Trump, followed by the flurry of executive actions, it is easy to lose sight of the broader challenges to the U.S.-promoted post-Second World War economic order. My analysis proceeds in four parts. First, I consider how we have moved away from multilateral to bilateral trade negotiations. Second, I consider ho...

Following Brexit (the withdrawal of the UK from EU and European Atomic Energy Community at end 31 January 2020), British government stated that it hoped to reach a new trade agreement with Canada be modelled after Canada–EU Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement, first free-trade deal for which Canadian provinces were directly involved every stage negotiations. In UK, while there are mechanisms...