Resource Library

Trade Liberalisation and Poverty

The Empirical Evidence

Author : Winters, L.A., McCulloch, N., and McKay, A.

Publisher: University of Sussex

Place of Publish: UK

Year: 2002

Page Numbers: 80

Acc. No: 810-S

Category: Soft Documents

Languages: English

The paper is explicitly empirical in focus. We report theoretical work if it informs empirical studies, but our emphasis is primarily on the study of ex post data pertaining to actual instances of trade liberalisation and related shocks. We also review a little of the Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) modelling literature, which, while fundamentally theoretical, does at least rely on some data. The paper starts with a very brief account of our analytical framework, which provides the organisational framework for the paper. We then survey the evidence on trade liberalisation and poverty under four headings: macro-economic aspects (growth and fluctuations), households and markets, wages and employment and government revenue and spending. While for each component trade liberalisation can facilitate poverty alleviation, in none of them can an unambiguous generalisation be made either in theory or empirically. Source: Trade Liberalisation and Poverty: The Empirical Evidence (Discussion Paper)