Regional Trade Policy Options for Tanzania : The Importance of Services Commitments

Jensen, Jesper ; Tarr, David G.

关键词: ACCOUNTABILITY;    ACCOUNTING;    ADJUSTMENT POLICIES;    ADVANCED COUNTRIES;    AFFILIATES;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-5481
RP-ID  :  WPS5481

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Despite the growing importance ofcommitments to foreign investors in services in regionaltrade agreements, there are no applied general equilibriummodels in the literature that assess these regional impacts.This paper develops a 52 sector applied general equilibriummodel of Tanzania with foreign direct investment, and usesthat model to assess Tanzania's regional andmultilateral trade options. The model incorporates thefeatures of the modern theory of international trade thathas shown empirically that trade and foreign directinvestment can increase productivity, and trade and foreigndirect investment with technologically advanced countries isespecially valuable for that purpose. To assess thesensitivity of the results to parameter values, the model isexecuted 30,000 times, and the results are reported asconfidence intervals of the sample distributions. Theanalysis finds that a 50 percent preferential reduction inthe ad valorem equivalents of barriers in all businessservices by Tanzania with respect to its African regionalpartners would be slightly beneficial for Tanzania. Butwider liberalization, with larger partners ormultilaterally, it will yield much larger gains due toproviding access to a much wider set of service providers.Finally, the results show that the largest gains in serviceswould be derived from reduction of regulatory barriers thatare geographically non-discriminatory.