The developing countries in world trade: Policies and bargaining strategies

Brief Reviews that the revenue from agriculture exports was used to subsidize imports for industry, had particularly pernicious effects. Policies adopted ostensibly to help farmers, such as gove~ent-in funds designed to stabilize prices, frequently siphoned off resources into government coffers. Bautista and Valdes have gathered eight studies that document this systematic bias against agriculture in Peru, Colombia, Argentina, Chile, Nigeria, Zaire, Pakistan, and the Philippines, as well as three essays which survey policies in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Some chapters are quite technica and the volume as a whole is a bit dated, being the product of a June 1987 conference. Anne Krueger provides a useful Sudan of the effects of trade policy on agriculture in her essay, ‘Some Policy Perspectives.” The editor’s conclusion, “Towards More Rational Trade and Macroeconomic Policies for Agriculture,” summarizes the empirical findings presented in the case studies and analyzes the effects of overall macroeconomic policy on agriculture. Odin Knudsen and John Nash’s “Agricultural Price Stabilization as Risk Reduction in Developing Countries,” is a pa~~larly valuable primer on how to help farmers reduce the risks from price fluctuations without recourse to heavy-handed schemes that can turn into disguised tax-collecting mechanisms. The Developing Countries in World Trade: Policies and Baagaining Strategies. Edited by Diana Tussie and David Clover. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1993. 267 pp. $17.95 (paper). Li~ralization of ~temational trade was ove~he~~y the affair of the advanced industrial nations until the 1990s. Developing countries insisted on setting up stiff barriers to trade to permit development of their infant industries. The rules of the game have changed for the better in the last few years, as developing countries now fight for increased access for their products to advanced country markets. Tussie and Clover have assembled twelve essays that consider their techniques in the battle for trade liberalization. Among the strategies discussed are high tariff reduction (used in Latin America), bilateral agreement with one’s largest trading partner (Mexico and Canada, the latter of which is peculiarly classified here as a developing country), and negotiated loopholes and vague deftitions that made restraints much less effective in practice than they appeared on the surface (the Asian countries). The topic is ~po~nt, but u~o~nately, the essays are not truly fast-rate. The authors all too often rely on the work of others instead of doing their own original empirical work. Moreover, the essays assume too much knowledge about trade procedures and the history of trade negotiations to make the volume fully useful for undergraduates. Fair Trade: Reform and Reality in the Ix&ernationalTradhg System. By Michael Barratt Brown. Atlantic Highlands, NJ.: Zed Books, 1993.226pp. $49.95 ($17.50, paper). A long-standing enemy of the free market system, Brown casts his argument in a new way for the post-communist era. He begins with a long Fall1993 1 673