Peter Gallagher

On aver­age, about 60% of the agri­cul­tural exports of devel­op­ing coun­tries go to indus­tri­al­ized coun­tries. But indus­tri­al­ized coun­tries are col­lect­ing a smaller pro­por­tion of duties on the agri­cul­tural exports of devel­op­ing coun­tries. This is due in part to the lower aver­age applied tar­iffs on agri­cul­ture in indus­tri­al­ized coun­tries: of course, this aver­age “smooths out” the …

Nowhere in Viet­nam is it more obvi­ous than in Ho Chi Minh city that this coun­try will achieve a level of pros­per­ity at least as high as Thai­land in record time. Hanoi bus­tles and obvi­ously rev­els in com­mer­cial suc­cess. But it barely holds a can­dle to the blaz­ing neon of HCM City; Sai Gon that …

I’m in Viet­nam this week and next giv­ing work­shops for offi­cials of the cen­tral and provin­cial gov­ern­ments and some state-owned busi­nesses on WTO. Viet­nam has decided it wants to com­plete it’s acces­sion to WTO by 2005, so they are step­ping up the train­ing pro­grams. Hanoi ear­lier this week, Da Nang for the next cou­ple of …

The Brazil­ian Pres­i­dent is http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20031016–045345-2484r.htm” title=“link to the Wash­ing­ton Times report”>reportedly press­ing for deeper polit­i­cal inte­gra­tion in Latin Amer­ica, includ­ing a regional par­lia­ment. “The par­lia­ment, accord­ing to Lula, would rep­re­sent the inter­ests of nations in the Mer­co­sur trad­ing bloc, namely Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. Lula has expressed inter­est in expand­ing Mer­co­sur to encom­pass more …

The “Seat­tle Post Intel­li­gencer(link to the P.I. edi­to­r­ial page)”:http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/144008_traded.html asks the right ques­tions about the US trade imbal­ance with China. bq. Ten of China’s top 40 exporters are U.S. com­pa­nies with local fac­to­ries. Many of these make things that stretch U.S. pay­checks because they’re sold at the always low prices at Wal-Mart. Does the pres­i­dent …

“Jef­frey Sachs(Sachs’ home page)”:http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/about/director/ pulls no more punches than he usu­ally does in a Finan­cial Times op-ed arti­cle on 15 Octo­ber (if you don’t have an FT sub­scrip­tion you can get the arti­cle “here(link to Sachs home page at Colom­bia Uni­ver­sity: pdf file about 50k)”:http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/about/director/pubs/ft101503.pdf as a PDF file about 50k). bq. “The cen­tral prob­lem …

It’s not very accu­rate to talk of ‘win­ning’ a WTO dis­pute. A ‘win’ may mean a deci­sion in favour of the com­plainant or the respon­dent on only one of sev­eral grounds. And the ‘win’ may or may not result in changes that sat­isfy the com­plainant, since the oblig­a­tion in a dis­pute is to restore com­pli­ance …