The success of existing GATT/WTO safeguard or flexibility provisions to sustain long-run liberalization stems from their procedural criteria (e.g., transparent and participatory decisions to impose new import restrictions) overcoming their suspect economic criteria (e.g., injury). The proposed SSM includes no procedural and minimal notification requirements. It would expand by arithmetic formulas the bounds within which a Member might unilaterally impose new import restrictions. Simulations indicate that the formulas provide a poor guide for policy – they would (a) allow an import restriction more often in situations when it is not beneficial than when it is, and (b) in situations in which an import restriction would help, they more often ban it than allow it. If procedural requirements are out – i.e., developing Members insist on a ‘usable’ safeguard – then the simple rule ‘bound rates may be exceeded for a maximum of [x] tariff lines at any one time’ is better economics than the proposed price and volume triggers. (No economic criteria are better than bad economic criteria.) Each Member would have the flexibility to change its lists of Special Products and Sensitive Products, there being a limit on the numbers of products on the lists at any one time.

This study offers new conclusions on the economic cost of a failed Doha Development Agenda (DDA). We assess potential outcome of the Doha Round as well as four protectionist scenarios using the MIRAGE Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model. In a scenario where applied tariffs of World Trade Organization (WTO) economies would go up to currently bound tariff rates, world trade would decrease by 9.9% and world welfare by US$353 billion. The economic cost of a failed DDA is here evaluated by the difference between a cooperative scenario (DDA) and a protectionist one (US$412 billion in terms of welfare). Another point of view is to compare a resort to protectionism when the DDA is implemented with a resort to protectionism when the DDA is not implemented. The findings show that this trade agreement could prevent the potential reduction of US$809 billion of trade and, therefore, acts as an efficient multilateral ‘preventive’ scheme against the adverse consequences of trade ‘beggar-thy-neighbor’ policies.

It is a well-established theoretical result that the trade policy of a large country can directly affect its own and other countries' welfares by affecting international goods' prices. However, there exist very few empirical studies that analyze the effect of trade policy on international prices. With detailed data on unit values and tariffs, I show how policy actions in Europe disrupted the global shrimp market in a non-negligible way and set the stage for the anti-dumping case in the United States. The loss of Thailand's preferential trade status in Europe and the international differences in food-safety standards during the antibiotics crisis shifted especially Thai, Vietnamese, and Chinese shrimp exports away from Europe toward the United States in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I document how those shifting markets have decreased US prices for shrimp significantly compared to those in Europe.