Policy Papers ⁽³⁶⁾

Read paper (World Economy 23, No. 8, August 2000, 959-978) Electronic commerce offers unprecedented opportunities to both developing and developed countries. In the short run, the gains are likely to be concentrated in developed countries but, in the long run, developing countries have more to benefit. This is because, in the short run, developing countries lack the infrastructure necessary to take full advantage of Internet. But in the long run, they can leap frog, skipping some of the stages in the development of information technology through which developed countries have had to pass. developing countries such as India that have the capacity to export skilled services through Internet should aggressively negotiate market access with developed countries in the future WTO negotiations. This involves negotiations on two fronts. One, they should seek liberalization by developed countries in sectors in which they have comparative advantage. And two, they should seek recognition of their education, qualifications, requirements met, or licenses or certificates granted in the markets of other countries.

Read paper (World Economy, August 1999, 799-824) This paper offers a critical review of the WTO Trade Policy Review of India (TPRI), 1998. It concludes that TPRI not only provides a detailed and up to date discussion of India's trade policies but also offers an excellent coverage of domestic policies. The latter is especially relevant in the case of India since reforms of domestic policies there are needed as urgently as trade policies.

Read paper (Highlights of the paper covered in the Economics Focus column of the Economist, December 14, 2000. Forthcoming in David Greenaway, Reanto Flôres and Germán Calfat, ed., Essays in Honor of Mathew Tharakan; also available as Policy Research Working Paper 2276, World Bank, January 2000) With import-substitution policies having failed and discredited, there has been a shift in favor of interventions on behalf of export interests. In this paper, I argue that, upon close scrutiny, the arguments for such interventions suffer from many of the same flaws as the old arguments for import substitution.

Read paper (World Economy, June 1999, 477-511) The paper offers a comprehensive review of the debate on merits and demerits of preferential trade areas and concludes against promoting such arrangements. Concepts of trade creation and trade diversion, implications for multilateral liberalization, open regionalism and deep integration are carefully discussed and critically evaluated.

Read paper Many policy economists advocate replacing a highly variegated structure of tariffs by a uniform tariff. This idea is not generally endorsed by academic economists. What are the sources of differences between these two camps and under what circumstances uniform tariffs can be justified is the subject of this paper. I conclude that the defense of a uniform-tariff regime lies in the politics of tariff making: the adoption of a uniform-tariff rule gives rise to a free-rider problem in lobbying resulting in reduced lobbying as well as a low level of protection.