The poverty impacts of the Doha Round in Cameroon: the role of tax policy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The authors aim to assess the possible impacts of the Doha Round of negotiations on poverty in Cameroon. During the recent period of economic recovery, Cameroon enjoyed a sharp decline in poverty, with the headcount index falling from 53.3 percent of inhabitants in 1996 to 40.2 percent in 2001, mostly due to economic growth rather than redistribution. Will the current trade negotiations under the Doha Round reinforce or curb this trend? They apply a computable general equilibrium (CGE) microsimulation model that involves 10,992 households in order to address this question. The authors find the Doha Round to be poverty-reducing for Cameroon. For the whole country, the estimate of the net number of people who are lifted out of poverty is 22,000 following this scenario. Further investigations indicate that more ambitious world trade liberalization leads to greater poverty alleviation at the national level, while Cameroon's domestic trade liberalization has adverse poverty and inequality impacts-despite giving rise to higher aggregate welfare. Under the Doha scenario, the cuts in Cameroon's tariffs are very small (the average tariff rate moves from 11.79 percent in the base run to merely 11.66 percent) so that world trade liberalization effects on prices more than offset the adverse own liberalization effects in this scenario. If the rest of the world and Cameroon full trade liberalizations are combined, the adverse impacts of own liberalization outweigh the favorable outcomes of the world trade liberalization. The results suggest furthermore that the choice of tax replacement instrument can have an important bias in poverty impacts: poverty gets worse in the country case study when using an imperfect value-added tax instead of a neutral replacement tax to compensate lost tariff revenue, and gets even worse when using a consumption tax. Key reasons here are the supplementary distortions which are nil in case of a neutral tax and greatest in the case of a consumption tax. In addition, accompanying measures should be considered to avoid poverty increases in the framework of Economic Partnership Agreements currently in negotiation between African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) countries and the European Union, which propose a drastic dismantlement of ACP tariffs over the next few years.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".