New trade measure reflects EU's more defensive agenda

Headline EU: Trade instrument reflects more defensive agenda

Packaging Material Barriers Faced by Foods and Agricultural Products Export of China and Countermeasures

Foods and agricultural products safety problems caused by the packaging materials have attracted extensive attention all over the world and some developed countries take it as a technical trade measure to increase the threshold of foods and agricultural products import, which brings about great negative impact to the export countries. Based on the analysis of the packaging material barriers faced by foods and agricultural products export of China, this paper will put forward some countermeasures to break through the packaging material barriers of foreign countries.

Peculiarities of retaliation in WTO dispute settlement

The dispute resolution procedures of the World Trade Organization allow sanctions to be imposed when a country is unwilling to bring a WTO-inconsistent trade measure into conformity. Apart from the fact that the procedure for triggering the retaliation process has ambiguities that need to be removed, the retaliation itself has some undesirable economic features. This paper looks at why compensation is not preferred to retaliation and then examines five economic features of the temporary trade retaliation that WTO may permit under certain conditions. Both efficiency and equity concerns are raised. The paper concludes with some suggestions for reforming this part of WTO dispute resolution during the review of the Dispute Settlement Understanding that is due to be completed by May 2003.

INCORPORATING PRICE-RELEVANT INFORMATION BETWEEN QUOTES AND TRADES: A NEW MEASURE OF THE EFFECTIVE BID-ASK SPREAD

This paper provides a new measure of the effective bid-ask spread in a dealer-auction. Our measure differs from the "quote-to-trade" measures derived from direct comparisons of trade prices with bid and ask quotes by explicitly incorporating the price effect of information arriving between the time a set of quotes is posted and the next trade, which will tend to be reflected in the trade price but not in the quotes, as well as the price effect in the situation vice versa. For NYSE/AMEX stocks in 1993, our measure yields estimates of the effective spread that are lower than estimates obtained using the quote-to-trade measure, and our estimates are, on average, only 31 percent of the quoted spread. We also find a U-shaped intraday pattern for our estimates of effective spread that is consistent with, but is much more pronounced than, the pattern that has been observed in previous studies. We provide a conjecture as to why this pattern may be related to the U-shaped intraday pattern observed in volume and volatility.