After top producer China decided in 2010 to tighten its export quotas for rare earth elements (REE), major customers feared being cut off from the valuable metals. The trade dispute intensified when ...the EU, the USA, and Japan brought the case before the WTO. The export controls raise questions about China’s intentions and strategies. This article argues that China’s export policy should not be viewed in isolation. The export controls are embedded in a greater transformation of the strategic REE industry. Beijing promotes a broad set of policies, including industry reorganization, resource conservation, and environmental protection. Next, the article examines three narratives that may be constitutive of the Chinese policy. Findings indicate that the geopolitical narrative, which sees natural resources as instruments of power politics, can be only partly attributed to China’s REE policies. The major driving motives are domestic concerns for resource conservation and environmental protection, as well as the development of competitive downstream industries.
•I examine the domestic actors, policies and discourses in China’s rare earth industry.•The Chinese export controls are part of a profound transformation of the industry.•Geopolitical concerns explain this policy only to a limited degree.•Environmental and development concerns are the main motives for this policy.
The agricultural and food sector is an ideal case for investigating the political economy of public policies. Many of the policy developments in this sector since the 1950s have been sudden and ...transformational, while others have been gradual but persistent. This article reviews and synthesizes the literature on trends and fluctuations in market distortions and the political-economy explanations that have been advanced. Based on a rich global data set covering a half-century of evidence on commodities, countries, and policy instruments, we identify hypotheses that have been explored in the literature on the extent of market distortions and the conditions under which reform may be feasible.
Trade policies create both 'winners' and 'losers', as some actors stand to benefit and others are left behind. More often than not, it has been women who have borne the negative impacts of ...international trade policy and it is thus imperative that future trade policy is negotiated and implemented with an eye toward women's interests. This collection represents an innovative systematic evaluation of the debate relating to international trade law, policy, and gender equality. It analyses the role of WTO as a trade policy setter, current debates and possibilities for gender-inclusive trade agreements and emerging topics such as e-commerce and gender-responsive standards. With a range of interdisciplinary contributions and national and regional case studies, this collection offers a comprehensive, up-to-date analysis of the intersections between trade law and gender, and is vital to ensuring that both men and women 'win' from trade policy in the future. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The overview of the country’s trade with all the continents during the period of 2000-2019 is given. The description of the commodity structure of exports/imports of goods, with particular attention ...to the industrial products, is followed by the detailed analysis of Ukraine’s foreign trade in 2020. The decrease in Ukraine’s foreign trade in 2020 by 6.4% is fully consistent with the projected WTO reduction of world trade in 2020 by 9.2%. Although COVID-19 had negative impact on Ukraine’s trade with the EU and the EAEU, it contributed to closer trade ties with Asia, improving Ukraine’s trade balance. The government and the national business elite should aim at solving the problems of increasing the volume and improving the commodity structure of Ukraine’s foreign trade with emphasis on the development of transport system for exporting agricultural and food products to the developed countries of the West and to the prospective economies of the East and the South. It is essential, on the one hand, to focus on the inflows of FDI and their appropriate use, and, on the other hand, on Ukraine’s participation in the formation of GVCs, global production networks. In the conditions of the Fourth industrial revolution, the economy finds itself transformed due to the fundamental changes. The optimization of foreign trade relations of Ukraine will not only improve the economy, but also enable the country to become a better functioning element of the global economic system.
Abstract
This study uses annual data from 1985 to 2019 to analyze the export and import trade patterns of mechanical and electrical products of China. We employ H-index, or the difference between net ...export capability and symmetric revealed comparative advantage, to assess the trade policies in exports and imports. The results reveal that China has comparative advantage in the imports, and has had comparative disadvantage in the exports before 1999. In recent years, the policy of trade protectionism has been adopted, which promotes exports in terms of exports and restricts imports in terms of imports.
Estimating Trade Restrictiveness Indices Looi Kee, Hiau; Nicita, Alessandro; Olarreaga, Marcelo
The Economic journal (London),
2009, 2009-01, 20090101, January 2009, 2009-01-01, Volume:
119, Issue:
534
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Studies of the impact of trade restrictiveness on growth, poverty or unemployment are frequent in the academic literature. Few authors, however, provide a precise definition of what they mean by ...trade restrictiveness. When they do, the definition is unlikely to have tight links with trade theory. The objective of this article is to fill this gap by providing for 78 developing and developed countries clearly defined indicators of trade restrictiveness that are well grounded in trade theory. Results suggest that poor countries tend to have more restrictive trade policies but they also face higher trade barriers on their exports.
The European Union protects over 1,000 Geographical Indications for distinctive regional foods such as Parma ham and Feta cheese. This paper tests whether external protection of Geographical ...Indications through trade agreements has increased exports of European Union Geographical Indications. The answer matters for trade policy, because the protection of at least some Geographical Indications has been a red line in recent trade negotiations. We use detailed export data for cheeses, covering the 2004–2019 period. The analysis uses the latest trade models that take into account the possibility of zero‐trade flows for certain goods. We find that legal protection of Geographical Indications in trade agreements does not generally lead to significant additional exports above and beyond the general export‐promoting effects of trade agreements. This finding should limit international fears of protected Geographical Indications widely displacing comparable products made outside of the European Union. However, although there is no significant effect across the board, more detailed analyses do find significant effects. In particular, Geographical Indications of higher quality and with higher market shares do benefit from stronger external legal protection. Based on these findings, the European Union may want to refocus its demands for protection of Geographical Indications during trade negotiations.
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