John Cockburn

Trade Liberalisation, Growth and Poverty in Senegal: A Dynamic Microsimulation Cge Model Analysis

Much current debate focuses on the role of growth in alleviating poverty. However, the majority of computable general equilibrium (CGE) models used in poverty and inequality analysis are static in nature. The inability of this kind of model to account for growth (accumulation) effects makes them inadequate for long run analysis of the poverty and inequality impacts of economic policies. They exclude accumulation effects and do not allow the study of the transition path of the economy where short run policy impacts are likely to be different from those of the long run. To overcome this limitation we use a sequential dynamic CGE microsimulation model that takes into account accumulation effects and makes it possible to study poverty and inequality through time. Changes in poverty are then decomposed into growth and distribution components in order to examine whether de-protection and factor accumulation are pro-poor or not. The model is applied to Senegalese data using a 1996 social accounting matrix and a 1995 survey of 3278 households. The main findings of this study are that trade liberalisation induces small increases in poverty and inequality in the short run as well as contractions in the initially protected agriculture and industrial sectors. In the long run, it enhances capital accumulation, particularly in the service and industrial sectors, and brings substantial decreases in poverty. However, a decomposition of poverty changes shows that income distribution worsens, with greater gains among urban dwellers and the non-poor.

Agricultural Price Distortions, Inequality, and Poverty

For decades, the earnings from farming in many developing countries have been depressed because of a pro-urban, anti-agricultural bias in own-country policies and because governments in more well off countries are favoring their farmers by imposing import barriers and providing subsidies. These policies have reduced national and global economic welfare, inhibited economic growth, and added to inequality and poverty because no less than three-quarters of the billion poorest people in the world have been dependent directly or indirectly on farming for their livelihoods (World Bank 2007). The purpose of the rest of this chapter is to outline the analytical framework and the common empirical methodology adopted in the global and national case studies reported in subsequent chapters, to summarize and compare the modeling results from the global and national models, and to draw some general policy implications. The findings are based on three chapters (part two) that each use a global model to examine the effects of farm and nonfarm price and trade policies on global poverty and the distribution of poverty within and across many of the countries identified, plus ten individual developing-country studies (parts three-five) spanning the three key regions: Asia (where nearly two-thirds of the worlds poor live), Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America.

The Poverty Impacts of the Doha Round in Cameroon: The Role of Tax Policy

The authors aim to assess the possible impacts of the Doha Round of negotiations on poverty in Cameroon. During the recent period of economic recovery, Cameroon enjoyed a sharp decline in poverty, with the headcount index falling from 53.3 percent of inhabitants in 1996 to 40.2 percent in 2001, mostly due to economic growth rather than redistribution. Will the current trade negotiations under the Doha Round reinforce or curb this trend? They apply a computable general equilibrium (CGE) microsimulation model that involves 10,992 households in order to address this question. The authors find the Doha Round to be poverty-reducing for Cameroon. For the whole country, the estimate of the net number of people who are lifted out of poverty is 22,000 following this scenario. Further investigations indicate that more ambitious world trade liberalization leads to greater poverty alleviation at the national level, while Cameroons domestic trade liberalization has adverse poverty and inequality impacts-despite giving rise to higher aggregate welfare. Under the Doha scenario, the cuts in Cameroons tariffs are very small (the average tariff rate moves from 11.79 percent in the base run to merely 11.66 percent) so that world trade liberalization effects on prices more than offset the adverse own liberalization effects in this scenario. If the rest of the world and Cameroon full trade liberalizations are combined, the adverse impacts of own liberalization outweigh the favorable outcomes of the world trade liberalization. The results suggest furthermore that the choice of tax replacement instrument can have an important bias in poverty impacts: poverty gets worse in the country case study when using an imperfect value-added tax instead of a neutral replacement tax to compensate lost tariff revenue, and gets even worse when using a consumption tax. Key reasons here are the supplementary distortions which are nil in case of a neutral tax and greatest in the case of a consumption tax. In addition, accompanying measures should be considered to avoid poverty increases in the framework of Economic Partnership Agreements currently in negotiation between African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) countries and the European Union, which propose a drastic dismantlement of ACP tariffs over the next few years.

Would Freeing Up World Trade Reduce Poverty and Inequality? The Vexed Role of Agricultural Distortions

Trade policy reforms in recent decades have sharply reduced the distortions that were harming agriculture in developing countries, yet global trade in farm products continues to be far more distorted than trade in nonfarm goods. Those distortions reduce some forms of poverty and inequality but worsen others, so the net effects are unclear without empirical modeling. This paper summarizes a series of new economy-wide global and national empirical studies that focus on the net effects of the remaining distortions to world merchandise trade on poverty and inequality globally and in various developing countries. The global LINKAGE model results suggest that removing those remaining distortions would reduce international inequality, largely by boosting net farm incomes and raising real wages for unskilled workers in developing countries, and would reduce the number of poor people worldwide by 3 percent. The analysis based on the Global Trade Analysis Project model for a sample of 15 countries, and nine stand-alone national case studies, all point to larger reductions in poverty, especially if only the non-poor are subjected to increased income taxation to compensate for the loss of trade tax revenue.

Measuring Competitiveness and Its Sources: The Case of Mali's Manufacturing Sector

Competitiveness is a hotly-debated topic among policy-makers and businessmen throughout the world. Yet it has been the subject of surprisingly little rigorous economic analysis. The paper presents a method which draws on economic theory to measure competitiveness and its sources at the firm- and industry-levels. It shows that manufacturing firms in Mali are competitive only on their local market where protection offsets a fundamental lack of comparative advantage. Regional integration and trade liberalization thus constitute major challenges with only the textiles sector in a position to potentially exploit the resulting export opportunities.

Trade Reform and Poverty in the Philippines: A Computable General Equilibrium Microsimulation Analysis

The paper employs an integrated CGE-microsimulation approach to analyze the poverty effects of tariff reduction. The results indicate that the tariff cuts implemented between 1994 and 2000 were generally poverty-reducing, primarily through the substantial reduction in consumer prices they engendered. However, the reduction is much greater in the National Capital Region (NCR), where poverty incidence is already lowest, than in other areas, especially rural, where poverty incidence is highest. Tariff cuts lower the cost of local production and bring about real exchange rate depreciation. Since the non-food manufacturing sector dominates exports in terms of export share and export intensity, the general equilibrium effects of tariff reduction is an expansion of this sector and a contraction in the agricultural sector. This, in turn, leads to an increase in the relative returns to factors, such as capital, used intensively in the non-food manufacturing sector and a fall in returns to unskilled labor. As rural households depend more on unskilled labor income, income inequality worsens as a result.

Implications of WTO Agreements and Unilateral Trade Policy Reforms for Poverty in Bangladesh: Short Versus Long-Run Impacts

The authors examine the effects of WTO agreements and domestic trade policy reforms on production, welfare, and poverty in Bangladesh. They use a sequential dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model, which takes into account accumulation effects, allowing for long-run analysis. The study is based on the 2000 Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) of Bangladesh including 15 production sectors, four factors of production (skilled and unskilled labor, agricultural and nonagricultural capital), and nine household groups (five in rural areas and four in urban areas). To examine the link between the macroeconomic effects and microeconomic effects in terms of poverty, the authors use the representative household approach with actual intra-group income distributions. The study presents five simulations for which the major findings are: (1) The Doha scenario has negative implications for the overall macroeconomy, household welfare, and poverty in Bangladesh. Terms of trade deteriorate and consumer prices, particularly food prices, increase more than nominal incomes, especially among poor households. (2) Free world trade has similar, but larger, impacts. (3) Domestic trade liberalization induces an expansion of agricultural and light manufacturing sectors, favorable changes in the domestic terms of trade. Although the short-run welfare and poverty impacts are negative, these turn positive in the long run when capital has adjusted through new investments. Rising unskilled wage rates make the poorest households the biggest winners in terms of welfare and poverty reduction. (4) Domestic liberalization effects far outweigh those of free world trade when these scenarios are combined. (5) Remittances constitute a powerful poverty-reducing tool given their greater importance in the income of the poor.

Doha scenarios, trade reforms, and poverty in the Philippines : a CGE analysis

Since the early 1980s, the Philippines have undertaken substantial trade reform. The current Doha round of WTO negotiations is now likely to bring further reform and shocks to world import and export prices and world export demand. The impact of all these developments on the poor is not very clear and is the subject of very intense debate. A detailed economy-wide CGE model is used to run a series of policy experiments. Poverty is found to increase slightly with the implementation of the Doha scenario. These effects are focused primarily among rural households in the wake of falling world prices and demand for Philippines agricultural exports. The impacts of full liberalization involving free world trade and complete domestic liberalization are found to depend strongly on the mechanism the government adopts to offset forgone tariff revenue. If an indirect tax is used, the incidence of poverty falls marginally, but the depth (poverty gap) and severity (squared poverty gap) increase substantially. If, instead, an income tax is used, all measures of poverty increase. In both cases, full liberalization favors urban households, as exports, which are primarily non-agricultural, expand. In separate simulations, we discover that free world trade is poverty reducing and favors rural households, whereas domestic liberalization is poverty-increasing and favors urban households. Under free world trade, rural households benefit from increasing world agricultural export prices and demand. The anti-rural bias of domestic liberalization stems from the fact that import prices fall more for agricultural goods than for industrial goods, as initial import-weighted average tariffs rates are higher for the former. In conclusion, the current Doha agreement appears likely to slightly increase poverty, especially in rural areas and among the unemployed, self-employed and rural low-educated. The Philippines is found to have an interest in pushing for more ambitious world trade liberalization, as free world trade holds out promise for reducing poverty.

Functional Forms and Parametrization of Cge Models

This study focused on the choice of functional forms and their parametrization (estimation of free parameters and calibration of other parameters) in the context of CGE models. Various types of elasticities are defined, followed by a presentation of the functional forms most commonly used in these models and various econometric methods for estimating their free parameters. Following this presentation of the theoretical framework, we review parameter estimates used in the literature. This brief literature review was carried out to be used as a guideline for the choice of parameters for CGE models of developing countries.

Case Study: A Gender-focused Macro-Micro Analysis of the Poverty Impacts of Trade Liberalization in South Africa

This case study examines the impacts on poverty and equality of the extended trade liberalisation strategy that South Africa has been following since 1994. The paper features an integrated CGE microsimulation model with explicit incorporation of non-market activities and gender decomposition. This makes it possible to assess the effects of trade liberalization on between and within-group poverty, as well as on gender-disaggregated household production and leisure. The findings reveal that trade liberalization is strongly gender biased against women.