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Trade policy reforms in recent decades have sharply reduced the distortions that were harming agriculture in de/veloping countries, yet global trade in farm products continues to be far more distorted than trade in nonfarm goods. Those distortions reduce some forms of poverty and inequality but worsen others, so the net effects are unclear without empirical modeling. This paper summarizes a series of new economy-wide global and national empirical studies that focus on the net effects of the remaining distortions to world merchandise trade on poverty and inequality globally and in various developing countries. The global LINKAGE model results suggest that removing those remaining distortions would reduce international inequality, largely by boosting net farm incomes and raising real wages for unskilled workers in developing countries, and would reduce the number of poor people worldwide by 3 percent. The analysis based on the Global Trade Analysis Project model for a sample of 15 countries, and nine stand-alone national case studies, all point to larger reductions in poverty, especially if only the non-poor are subjected to increased income taxation to compensate for the loss of trade tax revenue.

Achieving Shared Growth --- Agriculture --- Economic Theory & Research --- Emerging Markets --- Farm Trade Policy --- Income Inequality --- International Economics and Trade --- Poverty --- Poverty reduction --- Price Distortions --- Rural Poverty Reduction --- Trade Policy

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This paper studies the volatility of commodity prices on the basis of a large dataset of monthly prices observed in international trade data from the United States over the period 2002 to 2011. The conventional wisdom in academia and policy circles is that primary commodity prices are more volatile than those of manufactured products, even though most of the existing evidence does not actually attempt to measure the volatility of prices of individual goods or commodities. Rather the literature tends to focus on trends in the evolution and volatility of ratios of price indexes composed of multiple commodities and products. This approach can be misleading. Indeed, the evidence presented in this paper suggests that on average prices of individual primary commodities may be less volatile than those of individual manufactured goods.

Commercial products. --- Electronic commerce. --- Emerging Markets. --- International Commodity Prices. --- International Economics and Trade. --- Cybercommerce --- E-business --- E-commerce --- E-tailing --- eBusiness --- eCommerce --- Electronic business --- Internet commerce --- Internet retailing --- Online commerce --- Web retailing --- Commodities --- Economic goods --- Merchandise --- Products, Commercial --- Commerce --- Information superhighway --- Commodity exchanges --- Manufactures --- Substitute products --- Contracting out --- Investments: Commodities --- Macroeconomics --- Public Finance --- Commodity Markets --- Price Level --- Inflation --- Deflation --- Trade Policy --- International Trade Organizations --- Empirical Studies of Trade --- Business Fluctuations --- Cycles --- Index Numbers and Aggregation --- leading indicators --- Investment & securities --- Public finance & taxation --- Commodity prices --- Commodity price fluctuations --- Price indexes --- Valuation, origin and classification --- Prices --- Revenue administration --- Commercial products --- Customs appraisal --- United States --- Leading indicators