This research examines the impact of institutional quality on trade in selected Pacific Island Countries (PICs). Four indicators of institutional quality are chosen: government effectiveness, rule of law, regulatory quality and control of corruption; for six PICs: Fiji, Kiribati, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga and Vanuatu. Many of the PICs have been characterised with narrow export structures. Other than Fiji, most countries reveal widening long-term balance of trade deficits.

World trade is increasingly being dominated by preferential trade agreements that have taken precedence over multilateral trade negotiations. Within Asia and the Pacific an explosion of bilateral deals is taking place that seems likely to produce a tangle of hub-spoke trade blocs centered on major Asian or Pacific countries.

Customs Valuation of goods is an important aspect of trade facilitation. In Nepal, the process of customs valuation for the customs tariff was systematized only after the introduction of Customs Act, 1962. In 1997, the Customs Act was amended and basic valuation provisions based on transaction price were included in the Act. However, ACV is yet not fully implemented. At present Nepal's customs valuation system is hybrid of BDN and ACV. Nepal became a member of WTO on April 23, 2004.

This study compares the treatment of trade facilitation in four selected regional trade agreements, AFTA, APEC, SAFTA and PACER, and in one bilateral free trade agreement being the Australia-Singapore Free Trade Agreement (ASFTA), with a view to determining model trade facilitation principles and measures which may be instructive for developing country negotiators and policy makers.

Logistics services, which include activities required for the transportation, storage and handling of production inputs and finished products from producer to consumer, play a critical role in international trade. Consumers of logistics services are typically suppliers of products themselves. Consequently, the efficient supply of logistics services helps to facilitate international trade in a whole range of other products.

China’s early industrialization created distortions. This paper identifies major distortions in the Chinese economy in the pre-reform era and brings agricultural distortions into perspective. Comparison is made of the reform experiences in Chinese industry and agriculture. It suggests that with limited arable land, it is difficult to align Chinese agricultural production fully with its comparative advantage without also reforming China’s grain policy.

During the first meeting of the Negotiating Group on Trade Facilitation (NGTF) held in November 2004, the need to identify trade facilitation needs and priorities of DCs and least developed countries (LDCs) was highlighted, along with the need to address the concerns of DCs/LDCs related to cost implications of proposed measures and in terms of special and differential treatment 1 .

Special and differential treatment (S&D) provisions introduced in the GATT and the WTO in support of strengthened global integration of the developing country (DC) and least developed country (LDC) members have come under increasing scrutiny and criticism in recent years. One criticism has been that most of the S&D provisions are weak in their formulations, i.e., are expressed in the form of best endeavour clauses and hence are non-enforceable.

Many developed and developing countries have been offering special schemes to benefit least developed countries (LDCs) from trade through increased market access. However, effective utilization of market access opportunities by the LDCs may be constrained by the rules of origin (RoO) criteria and non-tariff measures (NTMs) applied by the preference-giving countries. This report deals with RoO applied and non-tariff barriers (NTBs) imposed by developed and developing countries for importing agricultural products from LDCs.

The paper analyzes how various preferential trading arrangements deal with agriculture liberalization and examines a few case studies highlighting the provisions on agriculture. It assesses the effect of preferential trade agreements on agriculture trade flows in the case of ASEAN. It finds that while the tariff reduction on all goods, including agriculture, in ASEAN provides a marked advantage from the MFN tariff rates, intra-ASEAN agriculture trade have not been all that significant.