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This book grew from what was originally conceived as a much smaller project to supplement the work of the United Nations Millennium Project Task Force on Trade, for which we had the pleasure to serve as co-coordinators. In its initial form, four research papers were commissioned to assess the impact of potential trade reforms on poverty reduction in specific low-income countries : Cambodia, Ethiopia, Madagascar, and Zambia. What were the potential economic gains these countries might experience from improved access to global markets and their own trade reforms required by the Doha Round? And what would be the impact of both types of reforms on the welfare of their poor populations ? To answer questions such as these, the studies identified the poor in terms of their consumption and production patterns and investigated the effects of both the status quo set of trade policies and possible changes in these policies. Our overall goal was to quantify the likely impact of global reforms agreed under World Trade Organization (WTO) auspices as part of a Doha Round outcome on individual developing countries. And we also wanted to identify specific policies and interventions needed to expand and broaden the supply response to reforms and to address adjustment costs. Ultimately, the initial four country studies were expanded to seven. The authors reviewed and analyzed an enormous amount of information representForeword vii ing the latest research and country-level experiences on trade. They discovered over and over that research supports the findings of the Task Force on Trade: trade openness can be a powerful driver of economic growth, which is, in turn, indispensable to reducing poverty and fostering development. The project was a joint venture of the Groupe d’Economie Mondiale, Sciences Po (Paris), the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, and the Development Research Group of the World Bank. The main findings of the first papers on Cambodia, Ethiopia, Madagascar, and Zambia were incorporated in the task force report, Trade for Development: Achieving the Millennium Development Goals (www.unmillenniumproject.org/reports/tf_trade.htm). Subsequently , all of the papers were revised, and three more were completed on Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Vietnam. Financial support is gratefully acknowledged and came from the Groupe d’Economie Mondiale, where the manuscript was completed while Bernard Hoekman was a visiting professor during the 2004–05 academic year, as well as from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, and the governments of the United Kingdom (Department for International Development–DFID) and the Netherlands (through the World Bank–Netherlands Partnership Program). Many of the ideas contained in the concluding chapter draw on research that was commissioned as part of the Global Trade and Financial Architecture Project, which was supported by DFID and chaired by Ernesto Zedillo. The editors are indebted to Alan Winters for his support and guidance; to all the authors for their willingness to prepare background papers at short notice under a tight deadline and to revise their papers extensively to ensure the use of a common methodology; and to Barbara Bender, Rebecca Martin, and Haynie Wheeler for help with the logistics. As with all volumes such as this, all views expressed in this book are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the institutions with which they are or have been affiliated. Patrick Messerlin Ernesto Zedillo Groupe d’Economie Mondiale Center for the Study of Globalization Sciences Po, Paris Yale University, New Haven viii foreword ...

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