Peter Gallagher

Oth­er­wise intel­li­gent peo­ple are appar­ently puz­zled about what the USA could get out of a Free Trade Agree­ment with Aus­tralia and, see­ing noth­ing obvi­ous that the USA might want assume that the US objec­tives are non-obvious and pos­si­bly devi­ous.  It’s fer­tile grounds for con­spir­acy the­o­rists. The Oppo­si­tion Spokesman (Craig Emer­son), des­per­ate for notice, says that …

Sup­pose all you wanted to do was to reduce the aver­age legal rate of duty around the world (the bound rate in WTO-speak) down to the rate actu­ally being applied on aver­age for all prod­ucts? How much would you need to cut tar­iffs in order to do that? Such a cut would mean no actual …

Here are three rea­sons for trad­ing busi­nesses to take seri­ously a free trade agree­ment between Aus­tralia and the USA. First: it will be big.  The World Bank mea­sures the GDP of Aus­tralia as larger than the com­bined GDP of all of the 10 aspi­rants to EU mem­ber­ship. The USA’s econ­omy is almost as large as …

Le Monde sticks it to Wash­ing­ton. But they’re close to cor­rect about the nature of the fail­ures that will con­tinue to echo in other quar­ters. The cur­rent lead­ers of the world’s most pow­er­ful nation have allowed diplo­macy and force to con­flict, when they could just as eas­ily have allowed them to work in har­mony. Wash­ing­ton …

meta-creation_date: March 18, 2003 The WTO Director-General Supachai Pan­itch­pakdi has been quoted by the New York Times express­ing con­cern that the dam­age to mul­ti­lat­eral deci­sion mak­ing in the progress to war will spill over into the WTO nego­ti­a­tions. I can feel the sense of trep­i­da­tion, Mr. Supachai said in an inter­view. What­ever hap­pens, if the …

He was, in fact, say­ing that no mat­ter which of two hypo­thet­i­cal out­comes of a vote on the sec­ond Secu­rity Coun­cil ‘ulti­ma­tum’ might occur, France did not at that time accept that an ulti­ma­tum was nec­es­sary. QUESTION — The Amer­i­cans are say­ing the oppo­site. Colin Pow­ell thinks he will get [nine votes needed for a …