英文文献翻译(共17页).doc

《英文文献翻译(共17页).doc》由会员分享，可在线阅读，更多相关《英文文献翻译(共17页).doc（17页珍藏版）》请在淘文阁 - 分享文档赚钱的网站上搜索。

1、精选优质文档-倾情为你奉上Assessing the Benefits to Developing Countries of Liberalisation in Services Trade This is a draft of a report prepared for the OECD Trade Directorate. The author is grateful to KenHeydon, and his colleagues at OECD for extensive comments and help with logistical and bibliographical sup

2、port.John WhalleyThe University of Western Ontario1. INTRODUCTIONa. BackgroundThis paper assesses the present state of quantitative literature which seeks to evaluate the potential impacts which would follow from global services trade liberalisation as it relates to developing countries. It is impor

3、tant to emphasize that what are frequently referred to as developing countries are themselves also a heterogeneous group of countries. They span rapidly growing economies in Asia, negative growth economies (in GDP/capita) in Africa, middle income and very poor countries, small and large, landlocked

4、and ocean access; heavily regulated and recently liberalised. I prefer the term poorer countries, and use this interchangeably with the term developing countries in the text. Much of the literature at issue is relatively recent, and is scattered in working papers and other less accessible sources. P

5、olicy makers clearly need help in unraveling this at times confusing and fragmentary picture of what the research community has to offer to guide their deliberations. This paper aims to do this rather than to advocate particular policy positions on global services liberalisation.b. Nature of Service

6、sThe paper begins by characterizing services as a majority of activity for most OECD economies (as measured by employment, and by value added originating),and a smaller but still large portion of activity for poorer developing countries. It suggests that so-called core services can best be thought o

7、f (see Melvin, 1989) as relating to intermediation through time (banking, insurance) or space (telecoms, transportation, retailing, wholesaling), with a wide range of diverse additional service items making up the balance of what most people refer to as services(tourism, consulting services, governm

8、ent services, utilities). This diverse range of activities is typically treated in quantitative studies as a single homogeneous entity, frequently labeled as services for analytical convenience, when in fact its heterogeneity suggests a different treatment for each. This heterogeneity is, in my view

9、, key to better understanding how services trade liberalisation could affect poorer countries.c. Impacts of Liberalisation on Poorer CountriesThere is a general presumption in the poorer countries that they will lose from global services trade liberalisation since their domestic service industries a

10、re inefficient and non-competitive. This view is despite the arguments from economists as to the gains to domestic consumers from lower prices and the joint benefits which accrue to both exporting and importing countries from exploiting comparative advantage and improved market access opportunities

11、abroad. It is also despite the commonly held view that the production of many services are labor intensive, which economists believe should be the source of comparative advantage for poorer developing countries in services provision. There unfortunately appear to be few if any studies of the relativ

12、e inefficiency of local versus Foreign Service providers in developing country service markets which allow the strength of these arguments to be evaluated on empirical grounds.This caution towards global services trade liberalisation in the developing world seems to reflect two concerns. One is the

13、general assumption in the developing world that any future negotiated global liberalisation of services trade will be largely one sided in the results it will yield. Their belief is that if new WTO multilateral (or even regional) services liberalisation is negotiated, developed country service provi

14、ders will likely gain significantly improved access to developing country service markets, but the converse (significantly improved access for developing country service providers to developed country service markets) will likely not happen. Asymmetry in negotiating power is one reason cited for thi

15、s possible outcome. The presumption is that the present regulatory structure for most service market segments will remain in place in OECD countries, and few significant improvements in access to developed country markets for developing country service providers will occur. This outcome, for instanc

16、e, is reflected in recent US bilateral agreements, including the US-Chile agreement.In reality, through the process of ongoing regulatory reform in the OECD,changes are in fact being made in market access arrangements for developing country service providers, though these are not necessarily reflect

17、ed in scheduled commitments in GATS in the WTO. Another important and neglected dimension to this conclusion is South-South trade, and the potential that developing countries have much to gain from liberalisation of markets in other developing countries. The point is that in terms of model-based (or

18、 quantitative) evaluations of the impacts of services trade liberalisation, were genuine two-sided liberalization to take place with their low wage rates, developing country providers could well benefit. This is especially so if there are scale economies in service provision (as in banking, for inst

19、ance). Most of the available studies of what benefits might flow from services liberalisation assume there will be full multilateral opening of service markets, and results of studies must be interpreted in light of this presumption. If one-sided liberalisation is the expected outcome, developing co

20、untries may well remain opposed to liberalisation on the grounds it is non-reciprocal despite the results of studies.The second caution that developing countries express is the nature and size of the adjustments in domestic economies which services liberalisation may imply. One dimension of adjustme

21、nt relates to potential foreign majority ownership and control of provision in key service sectors, and the related security and cultural concerns. Foreign entities having access to and control over bank records and financial information of domestic residents, for instance, is seen in some countries

22、 as unacceptable. Also, a vibrant and vital domestic broadcast or film industry may be viewed as integral to national cultural identity. Added to such concerns is the potential size of labour market adjustments if domestic banks are displaced by foreign banks, domestic by foreign airlines, and other

23、 large changes in the organization of labour-intensive sectors which might follow after liberalisation.2. GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS IN EVALUATING THE IMPACTS OFSERVICES TRADE LIBERALISATION ON DEVELOPING COUNTRIESPrior to reviewing existing literature relevant to the developing country interest in glob

24、al services trade liberalisation, it may be helpful to first highlight a number of wider conceptual issues relevant to the discussion.a. The Developing Country Interest in Trade Liberalisation in GeneralThe presumption behind most discussion of potential developing country interests in services trad

25、e liberalisation is that countries gain from more open services trade in ways which are similar to trade liberalisation in goods. This reflects the idea that countries have differing comparative advantage in the production of both goods and services, and more open trade will allow comparative advant

26、age to be more fully exploited in all countries. Put simply, the thinking is that propositions regarding the gains from freer trade apply equally to both goods and services. There are, however, many complications with this line of argument even though it is instinctively where most academic economis

27、ts finish up in their thinking.First, accepting for now the proposition that trade in services and goods can be treated as analytically similar in this way, the issue of how developing countries benefit from services trade liberalisation is subject to all of the nuances set out in the literature on

28、trade policy. While most academic economists instinctively believe that there are benefits for all countries from freer trade, over the years they have nevertheless devoted a considerable portion of their intellectual energy to producing arguments as to why the contrary may be true. These include ar

29、guments for an optimal tariff (terms of trade improvement from protection), for infant industry protection, for tariffs which transfer rents (rent shifting), and tariffs that offset other domestic distortions. These arguments presumably apply equally to trade in services and goods if they are analyt

30、ically similar, and hence qualify the presumption that freer global trade in service is a good thing.Second, there are a series of arguments about protection of trade in goods that relate in one way or another primarily to developing countries and these presumably also come into play in discussing t

31、rade in services. Examples are that increased trade can be immiserising due to a terms of trade deterioration; in a Lewis model with traditional practices in agricultural sectors (average rather than marginal product pricing of labour) protection of traded goods sectors is called for to pull labour

32、into import-competing modern sectors; in a Harris-Todaro model with an urban sector specific downward rigid real wage and unemployment, an import subsidy can be beneficial.In addition there are many broader issues identified in the literature about the form global trade liberalisation takes and henc

33、e its impacts on developing countries, and these would again apply equally to services and goods. If, as is usually argued, countries gain more from improved access to larger foreign markets(given the larger size of OECD markets) than from their own liberalisation, what they should seek is genuinely

34、 multilateral liberalisation rather than only participate in unilateral liberalisation. This should include freer South-South trade in services, as well as OECD/non-OECD trade. Being smaller economically, developing countries have less bargaining power than larger developed countries in trade negoti

35、ations, and this applies equally to trade in goods and services and hence globally negotiated outcomes may well be asymmetric.Developing countries also often argue that both trade liberalisation and its impacts need to be evaluated in the context of its wider impacts on the developmental process, in

36、cluding implications for growth and poverty, which are not typically centrally discussed in conventional trade literature. These arguments also presumably apply equally to trade in goods and services.Hence while the presumption is that global liberalisation of trade in services will yield gains for

37、both developed and poorer developing countries, and hence the central issue is to evaluate the size of any resulting gains, it needs to be borne in mind that the arguments even from conventional literature on trade in goods are more nuanced than this.b. Differences Between Trade in Services and Trad

38、e in GoodsAccepting for now that there is a general presumption that global trade liberalization in either goods and services is broadly beneficial for developing countries (a contention some would challenge), the next issue is whether goods and services differ in some important way. Do they need to

39、 be approached differently in evaluating the quantitative impacts involved?This is a key issue in discussing the impacts of services liberalisation on poorer developing countries, since much if not most of the existing quantitative literature treats services as analytically similar to goods. The app

40、roach is to define a single product, commonly called producer services, which is an input into production and against which trade protection operates with a tariff-like instrument. Liberalisation is then a reduction in or elimination of the tariff. Not surprisingly numerical results from models are

41、similar to those of trade liberalization in goods. Small positive gains accrue to most countries if there are no factor mobility effects captured, as in goods liberalisation models.In reality, however, the term services captures a heterogeneous group of activities spanning banking, insurance, transp

42、ortation, telecoms, consulting s captures ervices, retail and wholesale trade, and several others. Much of this activity facilitates transactions, providing the economic function of intermediation either through time or space which, as pointed out by Melvin (1989), when explicitly modeled as such ca

43、n produce different implications for trade liberalisation.Ryan (1990 and 1992), for instance, shows that when banking is explicitly modelled as intermediation services that themselves do not directly provide utility, but instead facilitate intermediation between borrowers and lenders, liberalization

44、 of trade in banking services can reduce GDP, and even welfare. Chia and Whalley (1997) have produced a numerical example of welfare worsening trade liberalisation in banking services based on this approach. The results from such examples reflect the use of specific formulations and parameter values

45、 and functional forms and are hence not general results. They do, however, suggest a weakening in the general presumption that gains will be automatically shared between developed and poorer developing countries if global liberalisation of services trade occurs. Bhatterai and Whalley (1999) provide

46、a related analysis of the implications of liberalisation in network services (effectively telecoms) where the same theme emerges that recognition of the special features of individual services changes the analysis of the impacts of services liberalisation.Another difference is that to achieve meanin

47、gful trade liberalisation in services may require modifications of factor mobility restrictions which may not be needed for goods liberalisation. This is recognized in Modes 3 and 4 of GATS which effectively relate to capital (FDI) mobility and labour (service provider) mobility. With restricted or

48、segmented global factor markets (and especially labour markets), large effects can come from services liberalisation if such liberalization becomes an indirect mechanism for liberalising global factor markets. This is a central issue for the poorer developing countries who have long pushed for liber

49、alization of immigration controls in OECD countries, since global services liberalization may be a vehicle for them to achieve this end.Thus whether services are treated as being different from goods, whether their economic characteristics are explicitly modeled, and how factor flows are treated can all make a large difference to the perceived effects of trade liberalisation in services c. Types of Services Trade Liberalisation: Deregulation/Competition/BarrierReductionA further key issue in discussing trade/lib