Peter Gallagher

I am amazed by how lit­tle the eco­nomic press under­stands the WTO.  It’s by no means an obscure orga­ni­za­tion; nor is it unim­po­rant[⇒ related story]. But typ­i­cal assess­ments of the col­lapse of the Can­cún talks are naive (to use a gen­tle word). Robert Kut­ner http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2003/09/kuttner-r-09–18.html”>asks in Amer­i­can Prospect why the ‘poor coun­tries appar­ently shot them­selves …

The “Cen­ter for the New Europe(link to CNE website)”:http://www.cne.org has pul­b­lished a “paper(link to PDF file, about 730k)”:http://www.cne.org/pub_pdf/2003_07_00_arfwedson_parallel.pdf by Jacob Arfwed­son that reviews the debates about the impact of par­al­lel import­ing on mar­kets for phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals. It’s well worth read­ing.  Arfwed­son con­cludes that the evi­dence of the ben­e­fits of par­al­lel import­ing or access to genetic drugs …

Over the past two days I attended and spoke at the Quar­an­tine and Mar­ket Access con­fer­ence orga­nized in Can­berra by the Quar­an­tine and Export Advi­sory Com­mit­tee to the Aus­tralian Min­is­ter for Agri­cul­ture. You can “download”:http://www.petergallagher.com.au/assets/QEACConfPWG_web.pdf a PDF ver­sion of my pre­sen­ta­tion (about 600kb) by click­ing the image. My argu­ment will be famil­iar to read­ers of …

“Arnold Kling(link to EconLog)”:http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/000242.html#000242 and “others(link to Tyler Cowan story)”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2003/week37/index.html#a0000270588 have pointed to the find­ings of a recent study funded by the National Bureau of Eco­nomic Resarch that sug­gests that the WTO may not do what many peo­ple would rea­son­ably expect it to do: increase trade or reduce bar­ri­ers to trade. Based on expe­ri­ence I …

Maybe the sky is falling. What a plea­sure to be able to agree with Clyde Prestowitz … for once. The self described trade ‘hawk’ of the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=2472″>recommends that the US and EU uni­lat­er­ally dis­man­tle their agri­cul­tural export and pro­duc­tion sub­si­dies in order to resus­ci­tate the cred­i­bil­ity of the WTO trad­ing sys­tem. ” Such …

“Daniel Drezner”:http://www.danieldrezner.com is a clever advo­cate for lib­eral mar­ket poli­cies. He ven­tures some “crit­i­cisms of EU ambitions”:http://techcentralstation.com/091903D.html in the WTO in his lat­est Tech­Cen­tral­Sta­tion arti­cle that I agree with. But he trips-up along the way. bq. Until TRIPS(Agreement on Trade Related Intel­lec­tual Prop­erty Rights), there was a very clear divid­ing line between what the global …

Equity and irra­tional behav­ior. ” If both (Capuchin Mon­keys) received a piece of cucum­ber as a reward, they behaved as before. How­ever, if Bros­nan gave one a grape, which they con­sid­ered a more prized morsel, the other often refused to accept the cucum­ber. Worse still, if one mon­key was rewarded for doing noth­ing, then four …