Kimberly Ann Elliott

Corruption and the Global Economy

The recently-adopted OECD convention outlawing bribery of foreign public officials is welcome evidence of how much progress has been made in the battle against corruption. The financial crisis in East Asia is an indication of how much remains to be done. Corruption is by no means a new issue but it has only recently emerged as a global issue. With the end of the Cold War, the pace and breadth of the trends toward democratization and international economic integration accelerated and expanded globally. Yet corruption could slow or even reverse these trends, potentially threatening economic development and political stability in some countries. * As the global implications of corruption have grown, so has the impetus for international action to combat it. In addition to efforts in the OECD, the Organization of American States, the World Trade Organization, and the United Nations General Assembly, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have both begun to emphasize corruption as an impediment to economic development. * This book includes a chapter by the Chairman of the OECD Working Group on Bribery discussing the evolution of the OECD convention and what is needed to make it effective. Other chapters address the causes and consequences of corruption, including the impact on investment and growth and the role of multinational corporations in discouraging bribery. The final chapter summarizes and also discusses some of the other anticorruption initiatives that either have been or should be adopted by governments, multilateral development banks, and other international organizations.

The Costs and Benefits of Duty-Free, Quota-Free Market Access for Poor Countries: Who and What Matters

This paper examines the potential benefits and costs of providing duty-free, quota-free market access to the least developed countries (LDCs), and the effects of extending eligibility to other small and poor countries. Using the MIRAGE computable general equilibrium model, it assesses the impact of scenarios involving different levels of coverage for products, recipient countries, and preference-giving countries on participating countries, as well as competing developing countries that are excluded. The main goal of this paper is to highlight the role that rich and emerging countries could play in helping poor countries to improve their trade performance and to assess the distribution of costs and benefits for developing countries and whether the potential costs for domestic producers are in line with political feasibility in preference-giving countries.

Biofuels and the Food Price Crisis: A Survey of the Issues

While the precise contribution of biofuels to surging food prices is difficult to know, policies promoting production of the current generation of biofuels are not achieving their stated objectives of increased energy independence or reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Reaching the congressionally mandated goal of blending 15 billion gallons of renewable fuels in gasoline by 2015 would consume roughly 40 percent of the corn crop (based on recent production levels) while replacing just 7 percent of current gasoline consumption. Moreover, while it has long been known that the net energy and greenhouse gas emission benefits of corn-based ethanol are relatively small because its production is energy-intensive, recent scientific studies suggest that the current generation of biofuels, including biodiesel made from palm oil, soybeans, and rapeseed, as well as corn-based ethanol, actually add to greenhouse gas emissions relative to petroleum-based fuels when land use changes are taken into account. That is, greenhouse gases are released when forests are cut down or grasslands cleared to plant biofuels, or food is planted on new acreage to replace crops diverted to fuel elsewhere. In sum, the food crisis adds urgency to the need to change these policies but does not change the basic fact that there is little justification for the current set of policies.

Labor Standards and the Free Trade Area of the Americas

Relatively little controversy surrounds three of the four core labor standards - forced labor, discrimination, and child labor. But the right to associate and organize freely and to bargain collectively is more controversial. And the use of trade sanctions to enforce labor standards is most divisive of all. In the context of trade negotiations, attention to labor issues can lower adjustment costs, slow a race to the bottom from the bottom, among developing countries themselves, and increase political support for trade agreements in developed countries. Elliott suggests using a parallel track to negotiate labor issues and link progress in those negotiations more closely to the trade negotiations. She concludes that nothing is to be gained by workers and labor activists keeping sanctions to enforce standards in trade agreements as the focus of their demands. Instead, they should ratchet up the pressure on governments to adopt concrete plans of action for raising labor standards and to finance implementation of those plans.

Pulling Agricultural Innovation and the Market Together

Feeding an additional three billion people over the next four decades, along with providing food security for another one billion people that are currently hungry or malnourished, is a huge challenge. Meeting those goals in a context of land and water scarcity, climate change, and declining crop yields will require another giant leap in agricultural innovation. The aim of this paper is to stimulate a dialogue on what new approaches might be needed to meet these needs and how innovative funding mechanisms could play a role. In particular, could “pull mechanisms,” where donors stimulate demand for new technologies, be a useful complement to traditional “push mechanisms,” where donors provide funding to increase the supply of research and development (R&D). With a pull mechanism, donors seek to engage the private sector, which is almost entirely absent today in developing country R&D for agriculture, and they pay only when specified outcomes are delivered and adopted.

Agricultural Protection in Rich Countries: How Did We Get Here?

After a half century of multilateral bargaining to reduce trade barriers, agriculture stands out for the degree of protection and government support that it still enjoys in most rich countries. This makes agricultural protection a natural focus of the current Doha Round of trade negotiations: in addition to offering the juiciest targets for liberalization, this round is supposed to address the needs of developing countries, where the vast majority of the world’s farmers, most of them poor, reside. But is there any reason to think trade negotiations are more likely now than in the past to encourage substantial reform of rich countries’ farm policies? This paper looks at the evolution of and current approaches to agricultural policies in rich countries to see if there are lessons from the past that might improve chances for reform this time around.

The Role of Labour Standards in Development: From Theory to Sustainable Practice

Weâ€TMre the leading free PDF for the world. Open library is a high quality resource for free e-books books.Give books away. Get books you want. You have the option to browse by most popular titles, recent reviews, authors, titles, genres, languages and more.Platform is a volunteer effort to create and share e-books online. No registration or fee is required, and books are available in ePub, Kindle, HTML and simple text formats.The tattoo3designs.com is home to thousands of free audiobooks, including classics and out-of-print books.Look here for bestsellers, favorite classics and more.This book brings together papers from a conference held in London in May 2009 and it shares the strengths and weaknesses of virtually all such volumes. On the positive side, the papers cover a wide range of topics under the broad heading of labour standards and sustainable development by scholars well known in the field. At the same time, the individual chapters are all over the map in terms of approach and quality, both aesthetic and substantive. And, at the end of the day, the volume cannot live up to either the promise of being multidisciplinary, or of moving from ‘theory to sustainable practice’. All but three of the 14 chapters (including the introduction and afterword) are written by professors of law, with just two by economists and one by a professor of international relations. Further, only a few of the papers offer concrete recommendations or practical strategies for achieving the desired improvements in labour standards implementation and enforcement. The themes that tie the volume together are rooted in Amartya Sen’s (1999) Development as Freedom and revolve around participation and agency as the essence of development, with labour standards as essential tools. The two opening chapters explore the ‘theoretical connections between work and development’, focusing, first, on the positive effects of well-designed labour standards in promoting economic efficiency and productivity, and, second, on the need to refocus International Labor Organization (ILO) activities around human capital creation, which Brian Langille argues is the key to human freedom and, therefore, to development. The volume then turns to the role of two particular sets of standards – pertaining to discrimination and to child labour – in promoting sustainable development. In Part II, the focus is on the important role that social exclusion and discrimination, including the extra hurdles women face because they are primarily responsible for ‘care work’, play in obstructing development for individuals and for societies as a whole. Part III addresses the complicated issues around child labour, including one chapter that focuses on the role of multinational corporations and the need for responsive, not just responsible, corporations to go beyond prohibitions on employing children in their codes of conduct to taking actions that help remediate the conditions leading to child labour. Part IV of the volume is called ‘development through trade and/or aid’, but the chapters are only vaguely related to those issues. One chapter is on (inadequate) environmental protection in European Union law and has only tenous links to the rest of the book; the other is on migration, human trafficking and the need to extend the decent work agenda in these areas. In the latter, Adelle Blackett notes the important role that freer migration could play in development and has an interesting proposal for a ‘reverse social clause’ to ensure that the rights of migrants are not violated. The debate over social clauses related to trade, surveyed in Elliott and Freeman (2003), revolved around the treatment of workers primarily in poorer (goods) exporting countries, whereas the reverse social clause aims at protecting workers in relatively richer (labour) importing countries. Thus, the motivation and content of the clauses are similar, but readers might be confused by the terminology. The final section of the book looks at the role of social dialogue in promoting worker rights and development – dialogue between workers and management at both the firm level and globally, and also between governments and firms, with the ILO as interpreter. Two chapters examine the role and limitations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) schemes to improve labour rights, while the third looks at international framework agreements negotiated between ‘big unions and big business’. While Charlotte Villiers concludes that CSR programmes are too inherently limited to be of much use, David Tajgman argues that corporations that are serious about their CSR commitments will have an interest in pushing governments to fill in implementation gaps related to the core conventions so that the responsibilities of both public and private parties in respecting rights are clearly delineated. In the former case, the emphasis is on unions as a countervailing power to corporations, while, in the latter, the ILO plays the important role of facilitator in the social dialogue between governments and corporations through its promulgation and interpretation of labour standards conventions. Journal of Development Studies, Vol. 48, No. 10, 1558–1562, October 2012