The international organizations (IOs) authoring this report can strengthen their individual and joint work to support governments in this endeavor. While the brunt of this work lies with finance ministries, trade ministries, and sectoral and specialized agencies of national governments, international organizations have key roles to play. The four authoring institutions are examining ways to help, individually and jointly, such as by collecting, organizing, and sharing data, coordinating analytical work agendas to develop methodologies to assess the cross-border effects of different forms of subsidies, and supporting inter-governmental dialogues. This will involve reaching out to and working with other international institutions as well.
This comprehensive volume provides the first book-length account on the politics of fossil fuel subsidies. This title is also available as Open Access.
"A readable, balanced, and provocative view of the prospects for fruitful international economic cooperation. The papers are realistic: each discusses the difficulties involved in reaching cooperative solutions or procedures as well as the benefits of doing so. The discussion among the conference participants is lively, interesting, and insightful."--William H. Branson, Princeton University
A New Global Economic Order: New Challenges to International Trade Law examines the dislocating effects of the policies implemented by the Trump Administration on the global economic order and brings together leading scholars and practitioners of international economic law come together to defend multilateralism against unilateralism and populism.
"China's accession to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 2001 was hailed as the natural conclusion of a long march that started with the reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping in the 1970s. However, China's participation in the WTO since joining has been anything but smooth, and its self-proclaimed "socialist market economy" system has alienated many of its global trading partners - as recent tensions with the United States exemplify. Prevailing diplomatic attitudes tend to focus on two diametrically opposing approaches to dealing with the emerging problems: the first is to demand that China completely overhaul its economic regime; the second is to stay idle and accept that the WTO must accommodate different economic regimes, no matter how idiosyncratic and incompatible. In this book, Mavroidis and Sapir propose a third approach. They point out that, while the WTO (as well as its predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade [GATT]) has previously managed the accession of socialist countries or of big trading nations, it has never before dealt with a country as large or as powerful as China. Therefore, in order to simultaneously uphold its core principles and accommodate China's unique geopolitical position, the authors argue that the WTO needs to translate some of its implicit legal understanding into explicit treaty language. Focusing on two core complaints - that Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) benefit from unfair trade advantages, and that domestic companies (both private as well as SOEs) impose forced technology transfer on foreign companies as a condition for accessing the Chinese market - they lay out their specific proposals for successful legislative amendment"--.
"This volume draws on a diverse range of international academic expertise and practical experience to enhance the reader's understanding of the shortcomings of existing international trade and investment law disciplines in their application to the multi-faceted nature of energy, and to explore possible avenues to bridge the gap between different areas of international law, with the ultimate goal of paving the way to a multi-faceted and comprehensive approach to the subject matter"--
This paper addresses the problems of defining and measuring government subsidies, examines why and how government subsidies are used as a fiscal policy tool, assesses their economic effects, appraises international empirical evidence on government subsidies, and offers options for their reform. Recent international trends in government subsidy expenditure are analyzed for the 16-year period from 1975 to 1990, using general government subsidy data for 60 countries from the System of National Accounts (SNA) and central government expenditure on subsidies and other current transfers for 68 countries from Government Finance Statistics (GFS). The paper reviews major policy options for subsidy reform, focusing on ways to improve the cost-effectiveness of subsidy programs.
In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries price subsidies are common, especially on food and fuels. However, these are neither well targeted nor cost effective as a social protection tool, often benefiting mainly the better off instead of the poor and vulnerable. This paper explores the challenges of replacing generalized price subsidies with more equitable social safety net instruments, including the short-term inflationary effects, and describes the features of successful subsidy reforms.
