Global Trade and Poor Nations
The Poverty Impacts and Policy Implications of Liberalization Bernard M. Hoekman and Marcelo Olarreaga, eds. Foreword by Ernesto Zedillo.
Brookings Institution Press and the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization and Sciences-Po, Paris 2007
c. 270pp.
This thoughtful volume assesses the likely impact of reformed trade policies on the poorest of the poorthose on the bottom economic rungs in developing nations. The focus on a spectrum of poor nations across different regions provides some helpful and hopeful guidelines regarding the likely impacts of a global trade reform, agreed upon under the auspices of the World Trade Organization, as well as the impact of such reforms on economic development.
In order to facilitate lesson-drawing across different regions, each country study utilizes a similar methodology. They combine information on trade policy at the product level with income and consumption data at the household level, thus capturing effects both on the macro level and in individual households where development policies ideally should improve day-to-day life. This uniformity of research approach across the country studies allows for a deeper and more robust comparison of results.
Bernard M. Hoekman is senior advisor of the International Trade Group in the World Bank's Development Research Group. Among his previous books is Arab Economic Integration (Brookings, 2003), coedited with Ahmed Galal.
Marcelo Olarreaga is a senior economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank. He is also a research affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research.
Ernesto Zedillo was the president of Mexico from 1994 to 2001 and is director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. He was the co-coordinator of the UN Millennium Project Task Force, under whose auspices this project began, with Patrick Messerlin of the Institut d’Études Politiques (Sciences-Po) in Paris.