Peter Gallagher

meta-creation_date: 29 April, 2004 We’re at least 5 — 6 months away from a WTO deci­sion on the US “cot­ton sup­port program”:http://search.ft.com/search/article.html?id=040428001010&query=cotton&vsc_appId=totalSearch&state=Form. But the CSM hits the nail on the head. bq. When the US gov­ern­ment gives away some $4 bil­lion to Amer­i­can cot­ton farm­ers in return for a crop that’s val­ued at only $3 …

meta-creation_date: 27 April, 2004 Orig­i­nal of the “Tow­ers of Hanoi(from the dic­tio­nary of data struc­tures and algorithms)”:http://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/towersOfHanoi.html prob­lem I’m in Hanoi for a few days to work on a project with the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture and Regional Devel­op­ment. We’re devis­ing a ‘roadmap’ for the inte­gra­tion of Vietnam’s agri­cul­tural poli­cies into the global trad­ing sys­tem defined …

meta-creation_date: 26 April, 2004 Clyde Prestowitz warns pro-outsourcing econ­o­mists that their argu­ment doesn’t make sense in cases where the price of for­eign labor is dis­torted by gov­ern­ment poli­cies such as exchange rate manip­u­la­tion. bq. If they wish to avoid the polit­i­cal pro­tec­tion­istre­ac­tion, econ­o­mists would do well to stop repeat­ing the tru­isms of free trade and …

The Aus­tralian Asso­ci­ated Press—oblivious to the “dan­gling participle(link to a dic­tio­nary of grammar)”:http://www.tiscali.co.uk/reference/dictionaries/english/data/d0081865.html’s wry insight—confusedly report that bq. After years of court­ing the 10-member group­ing, and being stymiedby Malaysian leader Mahathir Mohamad, ASEAN eco­nomic min­is­ters plan to invite Aus­tralian Prime Min­is­ter John Howard and his NZ coun­ter­part Helen Clark to a lead­ers’ meet­ing in Laos …

Zachary Selden, who is the direc­tor of the Defence and Secu­rity Com­mit­tee of the NATO Par­lia­men­tary Assem­bly, argues that bq. … many Euro­pean com­men­ta­tors and much of the pub­lic are resort­ing to con­spir­a­to­r­ial the­o­ries to explain the direc­tion of U.S. for­eign pol­icy and some­how over­look the fact­that Amer­i­can pub­lic opin­ion runs in favor of the …

The WTO reports a 30 per­cent fall in the num­ber of anti-dumping inves­ti­ga­tions launched by Mem­bers in the sec­ond half of 2003, com­pared to the cor­rre­spond­ing period in 2002. bq. 14 Mem­bers ini­ti­ated 115 anti-dumping inves­ti­ga­tions against exports from a total of 30 dif­fer­ent coun­tries or cus­toms ter­ri­to­ries … 46 of the 115 ini­ti­a­tions dur­ing …

The Her­ald Tri­bune is report­ing more details on the pro­posed ‘free trade’ area. bq. Euro­pean offi­cials refused… to dis­cuss farm sub­si­dies — a topic also bog­ging down the Free Trade Area of the Amer­i­cas talks. Instead, Brus­sels pro­posed a two-step approach by which it would ini­tially offer Mer­co­sur more gen­er­ous import quo­tas for key agri­cul­tural …