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Abstract
The world community and international institutions have made development and poverty alleviation a high
priority. The Millennium Development Goals, fixed by the United Nations for 2015, call for halving the
number of people living on less than a dollar a day. With this goal in mind, the international community is
calling current global trade negotiations, conducted by the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Doha
Development Agenda.
Trade liberalization is expected to act positively on development and poverty reduction. The recent empirical
literature identifies several key linkages through which trade liberalization affects development: the price and
availability of goods, factor prices, government transfers, incentives for investment and innovation, terms of
trade, and short-run risk (Winters, McCulloch, and McKay 2004).
The traditional argument in favor of a positive relationship between liberalization and poverty reduction
focuses on the first two linkages. A large proportion of poor people work in the agricultural sector, where trade
distortions are particularly high. Liberalization could lead to higher world agricultural prices and raise activity
and remuneration in this sector in developing countries. The same beneficial outcome could occur in the textile
and apparel sectors, where protection remains high and developing countries have a comparative advantage.
But openness can also have negative effects. First, government transfers can shrink as liberalization cuts the
government’s receipts of trade-related taxes. Second, terms of trade can deteriorate as liberalization affects world
prices. Third, liberalization can impose adjustment costs and raise short-run risk owing to competition from
imports and reallocation of productive factors.
As a consequence, it is uncertain how much trade liberalization would reduce poverty, and many studies have
attempted to assess the size of these benefits. The main empirical tool for this work is the multicountry
computable general equilibrium (CGE) model—a sophisticated and complex tool of analysis that often appears
as a “black box” from which results are difficult to understand.