Trade Policy, Openness, and Development: Essays in Honour of L. Alan Winters

Alan Winters was the editor of the World Trade Review (WTR) from December 2008 to mid-2020. Launched in 2002 as a joint initiative of the WTO Secretariat and Cambridge University Press, the WTR has become the leading multidisciplinary journal in the field of international trade broadly defined. In the period during which Alan was editor of the journal, the number of issues grew from three to five, reflecting the significant increase in the number of quality submissions. The impact factor of the journal rose to 1.6 in 2020, an increase by 150%, above that of The World Economy, arguably the incumbent in the field when the WTR was created.

Multidisciplinary journals confront greater challenges than single discipline journals in attracting high-quality scholarship. The fact that the WTR has become firmly established as a leading journal in the field of international trade law, policy, and political economy is a tribute to Alan's support for multidisciplinary research. He actively encouraged contributions by legal scholars and practitioners, and supported collaboration between lawyers, economists, and political scientists. An annual special issue of articles assessing the WTO's dispute settlement case law, co-authored by lawyers and economists, the product of a long-running project led by Chad Bown, Henrik Horn, and Petros Mavroidis, is a prominent example. It is not a coincidence that the group who came together for the Festschrift Conference¹ that was the genesis of this special issue comprised economists, lawyers, and political scientists.

As one author told one of us several years ago, he found Alan to be more demanding than the referees, but recognized that the revised paper that was eventually published in the WTR was much better for the revisions Alan had suggested. His readiness to invest the time and effort required to engage with the substance of the arguments made in submitted papers is something that has characterized Alan's approach to the many positions he has held over a long and influential career: he has served as a professor of economics, the programme director for international trade at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), three stints at the World Bank (as a member of the 1986 World Development Report; research manager for international trade, and Director of the Bank's development research department), the Chief Economist to the UK Government's Department for International Development (DFID), Chair of the Board of the Global Development Network, CEO and Chair of the Executive Committee of the Migrating Out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium, Founding Director of the UK Trade Policy Observatory (University of Sussex & Chatham House), and Co-Director of the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy (CITP).

Alan's research and his stints working outside of academia reflect his strong interest in assessing the impacts and incidence of economic policies in different institutional and country settings. A red thread running through his teaching, research, and public service has been a focus on understanding the process of international integration (trade, migration) and its consequences for economic development. Alan has made important contributions to the international trade field, reflected in influential studies dealing with the quantification of non-tariff barriers to trade (Nogués, Olechowski, and Winters, 1986); regional economic integration, spanning the European Economic Community (Pelkmans, Winters, and Wallace, 1988), the integration of Central and Eastern European nations into the EU (Hamilton and Winters, 1992; Wang and Winters, 1992), and subsequent work on preferential trade agreements (Soloaga and Winters, 2001; Schiff and Winters, 2003). His interest in the relationship between trade and economic development is a common denominator of both his research and his work at the World Bank and the UK Government. It is also reflected in early work on the economics of sustainable development (Goldin and Winters, 1995); in evaluating the results of the Uruguay Round through a developing country lens (Martin and Winters, 1996), in understanding the relationship between trade and poverty reduction (McCulloch, Winters, and Cirera, 2001; Winters, 2002; Winters, McCulloch, and McKay, 2004), and the benefits of international migration (Commander, Kangasniemi, and Winters, 2004; Walmsley and Winters, 2005). All these works are highly cited. At the same time, Alan's scholarly contributions had a profound impact on the real world. His work on temporary movement of natural persons (Winters, Walmsley, Wang, and Grynberg, 2003) was instrumental in shifting policy towards a more liberalized labour market in developed countries of the South Pacific. As noted by Roman Grynberg at the conference, by 2020 some 70,000 Pacific Island workers had come to work in Australia and New Zealand on temporary work visa arrangements. Few can claim that their analytical work has touched the lives of tens of thousands of people, on the opposite side of the globe, for the better.

Recently, Alan has played a leading role in analysing the trade impacts of Brexit and advising on the design of the UK's post-Brexit trade policy. He was the driving force behind the creation of the UK Trade Policy Observatory (UKTPO) in 2016, which – no doubt unwillingly – entailed a return to the subject of his early research on the impact of UK accession to the EC (Winters, 1987); this time centred on helping politicians and the public understand the likely trade and investment consequences of the UK exiting the EU. Much of Alan's time and energy since 2016 has been devoted to efforts with his Sussex colleagues to inform the design of an independent UK trade policy. An important recent contribution by Alan has been to build on the success of the UKTPO to establish the ESRC-funded Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy (CITP). This initiative, which began to operate in 2022, brings together a network of UK partner institutions to consider the domestic and international effects of UK trade and investment policy, and is meant to underpin UK trade policy making with analytical and intellectual capacity for years to come. The CITP reflects many of the strands of Alan's research and professional career, including the need to understand and address the (re-)distributional effects of trade and investment policies.

There are many features of Alan's research and his personal impact that we could highlight, but we will limit ourselves to two in this short introduction. Although Alan has published frequently in leading journals such as the American Economic Review and the Journal of International Economics (e.g., Winters, 1984; Bond, Syropoulos, and Winters, 2001; Chang and Winters, 2002; Iacovone, Rauch, and Winters, 2013), his most impactful research, measured by citations, was published in journals that the academic economics profession discounts, as well as in books and edited volumes. Martin and Winters (1996), a collection of papers assessing the Uruguay Round, is an example. Cited 586 times by now according to Google Scholar, if we add the citations to the chapters included in the book, the citation count rises to over 3,700. Orchestrating and organizing high-quality research by teams of specialists on important policy questions, as opposed to targeting top journal publications, has been a hallmark of Alan's success in advancing the state of knowledge in the field of international trade and development.

Second, as is evident from the few examples of his frequently cited works mentioned above, much of Alan's research is co-authored, often with students and early stage researchers who he mentored, and many colleagues inside and outside the institutions he has been affiliated with. His engagement with both younger scholars and colleagues extends far beyond research and policy analysis. He has been an influential mentor and reliable friend to all the contributors to this special issue in his honour, as well as to a much larger group of former students, co-conspirators, collaborators, and friends who were not able to participate in the conference where the papers were presented. Many of the contributors to this double special issue are co-authors of Alan's. The many papers from his friends, colleagues, and students we had the pleasure of receiving in response to our invitation to participate in the conference honouring Alan testify to the depth of the relationships he has built during his career. For many, working with Alan was a one-of-a-kind experience. Observing his intellectual curiosity, analytical rigour, leadership, and vision, but also his empathy, has had a lasting impact on generations of scholars, policy makers, and practitioners that is hard to overestimate.

Given the overwhelming response to our invitation, not all the papers presented at the conference could be included in this double special issue. We asked all contributors of accepted papers to keep their papers as concise as possible when addressing anonymous referee comments, to utilize the option of posting supplementary material in online appendices, and to refer to more extensive working paper versions in instances where contributions exceeded the word constraint we had to impose. We are very grateful for their willingness to revise their papers. We are also indebted to Cambridge University Press for accommodating the selected articles into a double special issue, and for financially supporting the conference at which draft papers were discussed.

The papers are organized into four groups, all of which reflect subjects that Alan has worked on. The first addresses the relationship between economic openness, development, and growth. Adrian Wood focuses on a neglected factor in the literature, the links between land abundance, openness, and industrialization. A theoretical framework that informs the empirical analysis and that accompanies the paper is co-authored with Alasdair Smith. Richard Baldwin and Rikard Forslid turn to another dimension of openness and development, assessing the likely impacts and opportunities associated with technological changes that drive automation and increase the scope to trade services. Xavier Cirera, Diego Comin, Marcio Cruz, Kyung Min Lee, and Antonio Martins-Neto investigate the relationship between exporting and technology adoption by firms in Brazil. Maurice Schiff and Yanling Wang estimate the role of trade for technology diffusion from North to South, and argue that differences in the composition of East Asian trade, as compared to that of Latin America, help to explain the productivity gap between the two regions. Finally, Pierre Jacquet reflects on the experience of the Global Development Network to argue that the donor and international research community needs to revisit the approaches that have been taken to bolster research capacity in developing countries and to enhance the salience of research to support development.

The second set of papers focuses on different dimensions of trade policy, including drivers of trade policy reform and the design of trade policy and its effects. Douglas Irwin, a member of the WTR editorial board, asks which of the three major multilateral economic organizations – the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the GATT – did the most to support the trade reforms implemented by many developing countries in the 1980s and 1990s. He argues that the IMF did the most, even though the IMF focuses less on the nitty gritty of trade policy than the World Bank or the GATT. Will Martin investigates the optimal design of carbon border adjustment mechanisms, a trade policy instrument that has become a central feature of the EU's efforts to green the economy. Kym Anderson, Erwin Corong, Anna Strutt, and Ernesto Valenzuela revisit and update their work quantifying the relative importance of global agricultural subsidies and tariffs restricting agricultural imports. Finally, Ilona Serwicka, Geoffrey Chapman, and Bradley Tyler discuss an important feature of the UK's new trade policy, an economic interest test in UK trade remedy investigations, designed to ensure that narrow import-competing interests are not the sole focus of decisions to restrict trade in products that have been found to be dumped or subsidized.

The third set of papers addresses a subject that has been a major focus of Alan's research: preferential trade and regional integration. Julien Gourdon, Karin Gourdon, and Jaime de Melo undertake an empirical assessment of the trade effects of product-specific rules of origin that are associated with trade agreements. Yohannes Ayele, Michael Gasiorek, and Manuel Tong Koecklin also focus on rules of origin, looking at the role that these play in determining the utilization of preferences in UK–EU trade in the post-Brexit period. Pierluigi Montalbano, Silvia Nenci, and Ilaria Fusacchia evaluate how Brexit impacts indirectly on the trade of African, Caribbean and Pacific countries with the UK and EU.

The last set of papers sheds light on linkages between trade policies, regulation, and non-economic objectives of governments. Joseph François, Bernard Hoekman, and Douglas Nelson, and Robert Wolfe, another WTR editorial board member, in their respective papers re-consider seminal research by Alan on what he termed so-called non-economic objectives. François et al. do so in light of the theory of economic policy, while Wolfe uses the lens of a political scientist. Emily Lydgate considers the challenges for trade policy as an instrument to mitigate climate change, highlighting the practical legal difficulties of establishing the equivalence of different national regimes when using trade instruments motivated by a desire to reduce carbon emissions. Jacques Pelkmans concludes the double special issue with a discussion of mechanisms and cooperation to reduce the costs of regulatory heterogeneity. As tariffs have fallen, such heterogeneity becomes a more important source of international trade costs, motivating deeper integration of markets – the EU's Single Market being the pre-eminent example.

Alan invented an acronym while at the World Bank, an institution with a strong penchant for acronyms: WYDIWYG (what you do is what you get) (Winters, 1999). His point was that national policies drive national outcomes and that at the end of the day nations largely are and remain autonomous. Brexit is a case in point. Yet WYDIWYG also applies to global collective action problems, the existential threat of climate change being a pre-eminent example. The opportunity costs of national decisions to oppose or undermine multilateral cooperation and the coordinated joint action needed to address global market failures has been a major theme in Alan's research. Rigorous, multidisciplinary policy-relevant research is critical to confront policymakers and politicians with the reality of WYDIWYG. We hope the WTR will continue to build on the strong foundations established by Alan and cement its position as the leading multidisciplinary journal for research on international trade and economic integration.