GTAP Events: 14th Annual Conference on Global Economic Analysis: Organized Sessions
The following organized sessions have been accepted into the conference.FDI and Multinationals in Applied General Equilibrium Modeling
Organized by: David G. Tarr
Foreign direct investment (FDI) of multinational enterprises has become a crucial element of world trade and investment. First, there has been extraordinary growth of FDI flows for decades. UNCTAD has reported rates of FDI growth which vastly exceed the growth rates of trade and GDP. And even during the current financial crisis, when world FDI inflows fell by 16 percent, they still rose by 12 percent in developing countries. Second, multinational enterprises have become crucial players in world trade. In 2000, UNCTAD reported that about two-thirds of trade flows involve multinationals and their affiliates in some part of the transaction. Further, multinationals have the potential of transforming the business landscape of any particular sector, which in turn, can bring about important economy-wide externalities, as in telecommunications. Finally multinationals are involved in a large volume of cross-border mergers and acquisitions. Given the key role of multinationals, especially in services, virtually all preferential trade agreements involving industrialized countries include commitments to foreign investors in services.
Deep Trade Policy Options for Armenia: The Importance of Services, Trade Facilitation and Standards Liberalization
Presented by: Jensen, Jesper
A world CGE model with multinational firms: MIRAGE MNF version
Presented by: Chappuis, Thomas
On the differential behaviour of national and multinational firms: A within and across sectors approach
Presented by: Latorre, Concepción
Foreign Direct Investment and Border Security Issues-- A Multi-Country, Multi-Sector Computable General Equilibrium Framework
Presented by: Zhang, Qi
An ecosystem of software tools and customized value added data products using GTAP
Organized by: Joshua Elliott
Users of GTAP around the world have been developing software tools that build on the GTAP database and expand its uses for over a decade. Whether reprocessing a GTAP release into a new form, allowing users to rebalance tweaked datasets for specific regional studies, or combining GTAP with external data to produce new customized data products (such as GTAP-E), these software tools have allowed the database to expand its reach and improve its accuracy and consistency. Often these tools have shed new light on the database construction process and have informed and improved later GTAP core database releases.
Panel Discussion (40 minutes):
The session will start with a discussion on the needs of the GTAP development (rather than end-use) community moving forward, such as data and code availability, documentation, and support, in the hopes of advising the construction of an improved set of standards and tools for increased and efficient development on the various GTAP data and software platforms. Our goal is to challenge participants to take a step back from important policy and environmental applications for a moment and think about the intersection of the data and the available software tools (e.g. GTAPinGAMS, GEMPACK, etc.) as "the GTAP development platform," and to engage participants in a discussion on the future of data/software development on this platform. The supposition here is that users around the world are reproducing applications, large and small (e.g. similar versions of the same code customized to new regions), and that, by streamlining the sharing, communication, and development process, there is significant potential to expand productivity and improve the platform. Panel discussants: Ian Foster (Chair), Tom Hertel (confirmed), Mark Horridge (Invited), and Tom Rutherford (Confirmed)
Presentations (20 minutes each, plus 5 each for questions):
The panel will be followed by three presentations highlighting specific examples of development on the GTAP platform. These presentations bring together developers of several such tools and "value added" GTAP data products, in order to anchor the discussion of the development platform in real-world success stories from GTAP users.
Panel Discussion on the needs of the GTAP development community
Presented by: Elliott, Joshua
Building a Custom Initialization Data Product for a Life-cycle OLG Model
Presented by: Elliott, Joshua
An improved version of FlexAgg
Presented by: Villoria, Nelson
Fit2GTAP: Replacing country data in the GTAP data base
Presented by: van Nieuwkoop, Renger
Practical Implications of Intermediate Trade and Offshoring
Organized by: Susan Stone
The changing nature of international trade in terms of off shoring and global production sharing is difficult to overstate. There has been a sizable amount of research generated surrounding the topic. This includes papers examining the implications for a country’s macroeconomic stability, wages, employment, immigration, technological ‘edge’, etc. The phenomenon has been so fundamental that it has led to a major drive by leading institutions to revamp the way we actually calculate trade. But how do these trends fit in with traditional trade theory? Do these trends impact trade in goods differently than trade in services? How does all this affect wages and employment? Are countries affected differently, some gaining and some loosing? The diverging paths of recovery and the need for policy makers to be able to accurately judge the state of trade when making decisions which will affect both their own constituents, as well as those of their trading partners, all imply a need for continuing and focused research into this area.
Does services offshoring contribute to labour market polarization?
Presented by: Nordas, Hildegunn
What does the Measurement of Factor Content Mean for the Policy Analysis of Trade?
Presented by: Stone, Susan
Systematic Sensitivity Analysis in Computable General Equilibrium Models
Organized by: Thomas Hertel
In recent years, Systematic Sensitivity Analysis (SSA) has become more commonplace in the context of Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) analyses. It has long played a role in assessing the robustness of model results (e.g., Wigle, 1991; Harrison et al., 1992). However, its domain of application has now extended to model validation (Valenzuela et al. (2007); Beckman et al. (2010), trade policy analysis (Hertel, Martin and Leister, 2010), and climate volatility (Ahmed et al. 2010). These new areas of application have raised important questions about SSA methodology and the proposed session aims to: (a) address some of these methodological points, (b) discuss appropriate software extensions to make these available to the GTAP community, and (c) illustrate their use. There are three papers in the session, corresponding to these three objectives.
Systematic Sensitivity Analysis for GTAP – Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going
Presented by: Preckel, Paul
Systematic Sensitivity Analysis (SSA) with Respect to Correlated Variations in Parameters and Shocks
Presented by: Horridge, Mark
Implications of Broader Sampling Strategy in the Contest of the Special Safeguard Mechanism
Presented by: Verma, Monika
Economic and Environmental Effectiveness of Border Tax Adjustments, Part 1
Organized by: Thomas Rutherford
In the absence of a global greenhouse gas reduction treaty, countries will legislate unilateral greenhouse emission reduction policies. Emission abatement fosters concerns of adverse competitiveness impacts for domestic energy-intensive and trade-exposed industries when foreign competitors are unregulated. Furthermore, the global environmental effectiveness of unilateral action might be jeopardized through emission leakage, i.e. increased in emissions in non-abating regions in reaction to reductions in emissions of abating regions. Competitiveness and leakage concerns motivate various policy proposals for special treatment of energy-intensive and trade-exposed sectors ranging from reduced emission prices or output-based emission allocation to border carbon adjustments.
Three sessions are proposed which provide insights from an ongoing multi-model cross-comparison on the economic and environmental implications of border tax adjustments intended to address adverse international competitiveness and leakage effects.
Organized/Chaired by:
Thomas F. Rutherford and Christoph Boehringer
Do border measures affect carbon leakage?
Presented by: Veenendaal, Paul J. J.
The carbon content of trade - under border tariff adjustments and a global carbon regime
Presented by: Weitzel, Matthias
Unilateral Climate Policy, International Competitiveness and Emission Leakage - An Economic Impact Assessment of EU Leadership
Presented by: Alexeeva-Talebi, Victoria
Using Embodied Carbon To Control Carbon Leakage
Presented by: Rutherford, Thomas
Economic and Environmental Effectiveness of Border Tax Adjustments, Part 2
Organized by: Thomas Rutherford
In the absence of a global greenhouse gas reduction treaty, countries will legislate unilateral greenhouse emission reduction policies. Emission abatement fosters concerns of adverse competitiveness impacts for domestic energy-intensive and trade-exposed industries when foreign competitors are unregulated. Furthermore, the global environmental effectiveness of unilateral action might be jeopardized through emission leakage, i.e. increased in emissions in non-abating regions in reaction to reductions in emissions of abating regions. Competitiveness and leakage concerns motivate various policy proposals for special treatment of energy-intensive and trade-exposed sectors ranging from reduced emission prices or output-based emission allocation to border carbon adjustments.
Three sessions are proposed which provide insights from an ongoing multi-model cross-comparison on the economic and environmental implications of border tax adjustments intended to address adverse international competitiveness and leakage effects.
Organized/Chaired by:
Thomas F. Rutherford and Christoph Boehringer
Border Tax Adjustments: Implications for Energy-Intensive Industries
Presented by: Caron, Justin
The impact of BCAs under alternative producer responses
Presented by: Winchester, Niven
Can Carbon Based Tariffs Effectively Reduce Emissions? A Numerical Analysis with Focus on China
Presented by: Hübler, Michael
Tax Interactions and the Welfare Effects of Policies to Avert Carbon Leakage
Presented by: Fischer, Carolyn
Commodity price volatility
Organized by: Sebastien Jean
The 2007-08 spike in commodity prices spurred renewed interest in the causes and consequences of commodity price volatility. This is a widely shared concern, with high-price episodes jeopardizing poor households’ ability to feed themselves in some least-developed countries, and incurring significant real income losses to many others, while episodes of low prices are problematic for farmers.
An extensive literature has been devoted to this subject during the last decades, emphasizing in particular the importance of storage in understanding this volatility, but several questions are worth a reassessment in the aftermath of this episode. The role of storage, and the desirability of policy responses focusing on storage, raises a first series of question, from both a theoretical and a practical point of view. Other questions have to do with the trade. Trade in agricultural products has been growing more rapidly than output in the recent decades, potentially creating a new context for price volatility. Institutions are also evolving, and even though WTO disciplines arguably imposed little constraints so far on agricultural trade, their importance is growing, and it might reach a new dimension, would an agreement be reached in the Doha Round. The role of exports restrictions is also a growing concerns. It is now widely recognized that export restrictions acted as important aggravating factors in 2008, but their exact role is difficult to identify and finding ways to avoid similar situations in the future is uneasy. Another, related concern is the development of biofuels. Their impact on grain demand was another important factor in the 2007-08 crisis, and their importance is unlikely to decline in the coming years. Climate change is another potential concern. Hence questions about their potential influence on the volatility of commodity prices.
Can Storage Arbitrage Explain Commodity Price Dynamics?
Presented by: Wright, Brian
Implications of Climate Volatility for Agricultural Commodity Markets in the Presence of Biofuel Mandates
Presented by: Hertel, Thomas
Optimal food price stabilisation in a small open economy
Presented by: Gouel, Christophe
Welfare and Price Impacts of Price-Insulating Policies
Presented by: Martin, Will
Multilateral, regional and unilateral trade policies
Organized by: Lucian Cernat
The session aims to present most recent estimates on the ongoing DDA multilateral negotiations and on several bilateral and unilateral trade liberalisations. The methodology of the papers proposed to be included is centred on CGE simulations of the effects of trade agreements. However, it is also supplemented by other analytical methods like partial equilibrium analysis or even qualitative description of future policies.
Economic Impact of Potential Outocome of the DDA
Presented by: Fontagné, Lionel
Economic Integration in South East Asia and the Impact on the EU
Presented by: Lopez Gonzalez, Javier
European Commissions proposal for the next EU Generalised System of Preferences
Presented by: Nilsson, Lars
New GTAP Data Bases and extension products
Organized by: Badri Narayanan
New GTAP Data Bases and extension products
What's New: Overview of GTAP 7.1 and 8 Data Bases
Presented by: Narayanan, Badri
GTAPinGAMS: A New Release
Presented by: Rutherford, Thomas
Software tool for GTAP sub-region expansion with the specific example of the EU NUTS regions
Presented by: Horridge, Mark
Augmenting the GTAP Database with Satellite Account Data
Presented by: McDonald, Scott
