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"Non-Tariff Barriers, Regionalism and Poverty is a collection of key articles in three important areas of applied international trade research: measuring non-tariff barriers and their effects, the consequences of regional trading arrangements, especially on the countries excluded from them, and the connection between international trade and poverty. Drawing from 30 years of research and experience, L Alan Winters illustrates the development of techniques of this field and his continued commitment to answering real policy questions at the times at which they are debated. The collection shows the ways in which economic and econometric analysis can be used to answer real-world problems rigorously in the area of international trade and trade policy. Readers will find that some of the research included is of current methodological relevance and some of more historical significance. This volume is invaluable to anyone who is keen on developing their knowledge on trade policy, regionalism or poverty -- three pressing issues in today's globalized world."--

AbstractThis article reviews Adam Smith's clearly articulated views about the desirability of free trade and his equally strong view on the necessity of sound institutions and 'the tolerable administration of justice' as key ingredients of successful economic management. It starts with Smith's views on free trade and shows how pertinent they are to today's high-level trade policy challenges. It then considers a more detailed day-to-day instrument of policy—the Trade Remedies Authority (TRA). Following Brexit, the TRA was created as an arms-length body for investigating cases for granting temporary import restrictions to specific products according to a reasonably well-defined objective process. The article demonstrates how, over the first 2 years of its life, the TRA has been reduced from a useful administrative instrument to a fig leaf for a political process for granting protection to petitioners. Unfortunately, this tendency to displace analytical approaches to policy by purely political ones can now be observed in many activities of UK governance.

This paper examines the integration of China into the world trading system, focusing on the size and nature of the shocks that this implied for the world economy and the reactions to those shocks proposed by policy makers and academics. While the WTO has acted as a forum in which many of the adjustment pressures created by China's rapid growth were dealt with fairly constructively, the recent shift by the United States and the EU to mega-regional trade deals, notably the Tran-Pacific Partnership, and that exclude China, marks a dangerous shift away from engaging the world's second largest economy as an equal in a cooperative fashion.

This paper considers the impact of the economic rise of China
on both firms and competition in middle income countries (locally) and
on the world trading system (globally). It examines the size and nature
of the shock that China has administered to the world economy, the way
in which firms and export sectors in one middle income country have
accommodated that rise, some of the frictions and adjustment strains
that China's rise pose for the world trading system, and two cases which
I believe to pose threats to the world trading system if the parties
involved do not behave with great care. I will argue that integrating
China into the global economy in a way that benefits nearly all presents
perhaps the most important international trade and trade policy issue of
the present era. The shock that the emergence of China is administering
to the world economy is larger than any seen previously—and by a large
margin. While the huge increase in global production that China has
generated brings widespread benefits, there are inevitably stresses and
indeed possibly some losers. I start to identify these in two exercises
that are reported here, both, for reasons of data availability, carried
out on Mexico. One looks at firm adjustment and the other at export
margins. I then discuss China's role in the wider trading system—the WTO
and in global imbalances—and finally identify two areas in which the
poor handling of the integration of China into the world economy could
derail the world trading system. I mention these latter issues not as
inevitable disasters but as issues that are sensitive enough to explode
if not handled delicately. An important role of economists in
policy-making is to discourage inappropriate policies and descent into
trade war as a result of the competition that China brings would
certainly count as 'inappropriate'. It is as a warning, no more, that I
address them in this paper.