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Abstract
Within WTO agricultural negotiations, this paper deals with alternative criteria for the
selection of sensitive products. Existing methodologies mostly rely on the analysis of tariffs and
trade flows. On the contrary, assessments of the economic impacts on specific groups of
stakeholders, namely the domestic agricultural sector, are missing or conducted at a high level
of product aggregation. We hence develop a methodology that considers the effects of the
selection of sensitive products on domestic agricultural prices. Our model, TRIMAG (Tariff
Reduction Impact Model for Agriculture), defined at the 8-digit level, optimizes the domestic
agricultural value added subject to a maximum number of sensitive tariff lines. The existing
methodologies are applied to the Swiss tariff schedule and results compared with those of
TRIMAG. Findings confirm the importance of developing sound economic criteria for the exante
impact assessment of policy flexibilities. Furthermore, TRIMAG can be considered as a
tariff aggregation tool that can be linked to agricultural simulation models that operate at a
higher level of aggregation.