درباره تجزیه و تحلیل تعادل عمومی آزاد سازی تجارت در اردن

With a computable general equilibrium model, we investigate Jordan's trade policies: implementation of the Uruguay Round (UR) and establishment of a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the European Union. Simulations suggest that the UR would improve Jordan's welfare and that the FTA, which presupposes the UR, would bring about further improvements in Jordan's welfare. Under these trade liberalization measures, the chemical and the agricultural sectors would expand while the nonmetal mineral sector would contract.

Recently, economic integration is rapidly proceeding in two aspects: worldwide trade negotiations and regional economic integration. Among the latest achievements of the economic integration, the former is represented by the Uruguay Round (UR) in April 1994 and the latter by the regional integration within and around the European Union (EU). These measures of trade liberalization are applied, of course, to developing countries like Jordan. Jordan will implement the UR agreements and furthermore currently plans to establish a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the EU. Jordan, which has kept strong trade barriers, would undergo important changes by the UR implementation and the FTA establishment. How will these trade measures affect Jordan? A computable general equilibrium (CGE) study of the UR for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region was made by Diwan, Yang, and Wang (1995). The studies by Francois, McDonald, and Nordström (1995) and Harrison, Rutherford, and Tarr (1995) covered the UR on the MENA region. Impacts of the FTA with the EU on Morocco were analyzed by Rutherford, Rutström, and Tarr (1993). However, as far as the author knows, there has been no analysis about impacts of trade liberalization measures, such as the UR and the FTA, for Jordan. To investigate impacts of the UR and the FTA with the EU, we develop a CGE model and perform trade policy simulations for Jordan. We set two scenarios: (a) the UR implementation and (b) the FTA establishment with the EU. Our main findings are that implementation of the UR and the FTA with the EU would improve welfare of Jordan and that the chemical and the agricultural sectors would expand most significantly while the nonmetal mineral would shrink most heavily. This introductory section is followed by Section 2, which explains our CGE model and simulation scenarios. Section 3 examines the simulation results, and Section 4 concludes our paper.

Some highlights of the simulations can be summarized as follows. The UR and the FTA implementation would improve Jordan's welfare. The UR would bring about trade creation effects in exports and imports while the FTA would do trade diversion favorably for imports from the EU. The UR would expand output of the chemical and the agricultural sectors most significantly and would especially reduce that of the nonmetal mineral sector. The FTA intensify the sectoral output changes further in all the sectors except for the two sectors: the textile and apparel and the mining sectors, whose output would increase from their levels contracted in the UR. Some qualifications should be pointed out for our simulation scenarios. In the UR simulation, we considered neither removals of export subsidies and quantitative restrictions (except for the MFA) nor agreements in trade of services. If trade liberalization measures with respect to these were included, trade would improve Jordan's welfare further than those shown in our simulation results. Our FTA assumptions, such as the unitary tariff reduction rate, may be too simple. Further work must be done to improve the model and its results.