High food prices have consistently forced families to adopt a myriad of coping strategies to meet their food needs. A comprehensive understanding of the nature and diversity of such strategies, the relative effectiveness of different strategies, and the factors that determine the choice of various strategies by different vulnerable groups is of prime importance in designing and implementing appropriate policies and programs on vulnerable groups.

Rules of Origin (RoO) are essential part of trade rules that become very important in the context of increasing globalisation of production process. Most industrial goods today incorporate inputs from a wide variety of countries (e.g. automobiles, electronic goods etc) and when traded it becomes important to determine their country of origin as tariffs depend on country of origin. International production networks (IPN) promote this new pattern of trade, such that goods travel across several locations before reaching final consumers.

The outbreak of the global financial crisis, the fluctuation of commodity prices, and the economic slowdown of the major trading partners in 2008 and the early 2009 has brought about one of the most difficult challenges to lower-income economies in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS, i.e. Vietnam, Lao PDR and Cambodia) since the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998. Foreign trade, including both export and import, severely declined, leading to serious contraction of economic growth.

Rules of origin (ROO) define a condition under which preferential access to the product of an exporting country may be granted. Under the rules, a product must satisfy the fixed originating criteria they lay out. These rules are applied to determine whether particular exported products are eligible for preferential treatment based, for example, on the generalized system of preferences (GSP) when developed countries import the products.

This paper formulated in the context of the Indian experience in regionalism. In the past decade, India’s trade policy has seen a marked shift towards regionalism with the signing of many regional trade agreements (RTAs). As of May 2011, 13 RTAs were in force, with at least eight more under negotiations. This paper explores whether these RTAs were ultimately of use to Indian traders. To assess the usefulness of an RTA to traders, percentage ratios, like utilization, product-coverage and utility ratios, are generally calculated.

Sri Lanka’s economy which followed an inward-looking policy regime in the 1960s and the 1970’s witnessed a marked shift towards the liberalization of the economy since 1977. This was followed by structural transformations, with the economy changing its course from being primarily an agricultural economy to one driven by the services and industrial sectors. Furthermore, with the liberalization of the economy, Sri Lanka became increasingly dependent on trade, with the trade to GDP ratio being 41 per cent as of 2008.

This paper provides an overview of developments in implementation of protectionist measures relevant for Asia-Pacific economies in the period associated with recovery after the Global Economic Crisis of 2008/2009. At the very start of the Global Economic Crisis, there was a real fear that the sharp collapse in exports and production in many countries would lead to repeat of the damaging trade wars from the 1930s.

Moving goods across borders requires meeting a vast number of commercial, transport and regulatory requirements. Inefficiencies in complying with these requirements often create unnecessary delays and costs. A source of tremendous inefficiencies is associated with the preparation of transport and regulatory documents, unclear border procedures, and overzealous cargo inspection. We need to understand how much these add to the costs of doing business across border and which way they affect the growth in trade.

An in-depth understanding of trading processes is required in order to identify areas that create bottlenecks in trade and to take measures to remove such bottlenecks. Towards this end, this study examines the trading procedures and processes for two export and two import products of Sri Lanka. The study involves mapping the processes involved in the export of tea to Japan and tyres to India, and the processes involved in the import of motor vehicles from Japan and textiles from India, through a business process analysis.

One of the main objectives of the World Trade Organization (WTO) is to facilitate the world’s trade and production. It enforces legally binding multilateral agreements on trade in goods, services, and trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights to manage global trade efficiently. At the end of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1994, the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement was implemented to regulate standards of Intellectual Property (IP) regulations in WTO member countries.