Question

By pushing the trade of their cultural goods and values, the bigger, developed countries are harming less developed and smaller countries by marginalizing their own cultural production

agree or disagree?

Answer 1

For sustainable economic development, policies that make an economy open to trade and investment with the rest of the world are needed. The proof of this is simple. No country, in terms of dramatic improvements in living standards for its people, has achieved economic prosperity in recent decades without being accessible to the rest of the world. Trade opening (along with opening up to foreign direct investment) has, on the other hand, been an significant aspect of East Asia's economic growth, where the average tariff on imports has fallen from 30 percent to 10 percent over the past 20 years.

Over a variety of very high tariffs, including tariff peaks (tariffs above 15%), tariff inflation (tariffs rising with the speed of processing), and stringent tariff quotas (limits on the volume that can be imported at a lower tariff rate), industrial countries retain high agricultural security. In agriculture, the average tariff security is around nine times higher than in manufacturing. Furthermore, agricultural subsidies in developed countries, equal to 2/3 of Africa 's overall GDP, weaken the agricultural industries and exports of developing countries by depressing global prices and pre-empting markets. The European Commission, for example, spends EUR 2.7 billion a year on making sugar lucrative for European farmers, thus closing down low-cost imports of tropical sugar.

Many developed countries have high tariffs themselves. Their duties on the industrial goods they produce, on average, are three or four times higher than those of developed nations, and they have the same tariff peak and escalation characteristics. Agriculture tariffs are also higher (18 percent) than for consumer goods. Preferential access systems for poorer countries have not been particularly successful in increasing consumer access for these countries, for a number of reasons. Such programmes also exempt highly protected goods of the greatest importance to exporters in the poorest countries, or offer less generous incentives for them. They are also nuanced, non-transparent and subject to different exemptions and conditions (including non-economic ones) which restrict or terminate benefits until substantial market access has been achieved.