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The challenge of reducing international trade and migration barriers

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  • Anderson, Kym
  • Winters, L. Alan

Abstract

While barriers to trade in most goods and some services including capital flows have been reduced considerably over the past two decades, many remain. Such policies harm most the economies imposing them, but the worst of the merchandise barriers (in agriculture and textiles) are particularly harmful to the world's poorest people, as are barriers to worker migration across borders. This paper focuses on how costly those anti-poor trade policies are, and examines possible strategies to reduce remaining distortions. Two opportunities in particular are addressed: completing the Doha Development Agenda process at the World Trade Organization (WTO), and freeing up the international movement of workers. A review of the economic benefits and adjustment costs associated with these opportunities provides the foundation to undertake benefit/cost analysis required to rank this set of opportunities against those aimed at addressing the world's other key challenges as part of the Copenhagen Consensus project. The paper concludes with key caveats and suggests that taking up these opportunities could generate huge social benefit/cost ratios that are considerably higher than the direct economic ones quantified in this study, even without factoring in their contribution to alleviating several of the other challenges identified by that project, including malnutrition, disease, poor education and air pollution.

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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by The World Bank in its series Policy Research Working Paper Series with number 4598.

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Date of creation: 01 Apr 2008
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Handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:4598

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Related research

Keywords: Economic Theory&Research; Environmental Economics&Policies; Emerging Markets; Free Trade; Trade Policy;

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Cited by:
  1. Edwards, T. Huw, 2009. "Globalisation as a 'good times' phenomenon: a search-based explanation," Economics Discussion Papers 2009-55, Kiel Institute for the World Economy.
  2. Jacques Poot & Anna Strutt, 2010. "International Trade Agreements and International Migration," The World Economy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 33(12), pages 1923-1954, December.
  3. Ratha, Dilip & Mohapatra, Sanket & Scheja, Elina, 2011. "Impact of migration on economic and social development : a review of evidence and emerging issues," Policy Research Working Paper Series 5558, The World Bank.

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