Peter Gallagher

Accord­ing to the offi­cial media, China’s cere­al out­put dropped for the fifth con­sec­u­tive year to 431 mil­lion tons last year. bq. Chi­nese Pre­mier Wen Jiabao last month announced the deci­sion to rescind agri­cul­tur­al tax in five years, which means farm­ers’ bur­den would be reduced by as much as 11.8 bil­lion yuan in each of the […]

In the course of a piece on AGOA—the US African Growth and Oppor­tu­ni­ty Act which pro­vides trade pref­er­ences for eli­gi­ble African coun­tries in the US market—“Ben Muse(link to Ben’s website)”:http://www.acsalaska.net/~benmuse/blog/2004_04_01_archive.html#108223159474153275 asks about eval­u­a­tion of the pro­gramme. Click for larg­er image in a pop­up win­dow There’s no doubt that it’s an impor­tant oppor­tu­ni­ty for sev­er­al African […]

“Arnold Kling”:http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/000449.html recent­ly drew atten­tion to the revi­sion of a paper by “Andrew Rose(home page)”:http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/arose/ that ques­tions whether the GATT/WTO improves world trade. Rose “asks(link to paper on NBER site)”:http://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/9273.html whether the WTO mat­ters at all. Before him, he says, despite moun­tains of pro- and anti- GATT/WTO rhetoric, this cru­cial ques­tion has been buried by […]

meta-cre­a­tion_­­date: 18 April, 2004 An Israeli jour­nal­ist “outlines”:http://www.tikkun.org/index.cfm/action/current/article/233.html the par­al­lels between the “Sharon dis­en­gage­ment plan”:http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=416024&contrassID=1&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y and the failed attempts by South Africa’s for­mer apartheid regime to ‘dis­en­gage’ from the prob­lem of the black major­i­ty.

The NZ Prime Min­is­ter has “announced”:http://www.beehive.govt.nz/ViewDocument.cfm?DocumentID=19432 an agree­ment to begin nego­ti­a­tions next year on a bilat­er­al free trade agree­ment with Chi­na; the first OECD coun­try to do so. The price of this pri­or­i­ty is NZ acknowl­edge­ment that Chi­na is a “mar­kete­con­o­my”. Although the NZ gov­ern­ment says that this is just a ‘tech­ni­cal’ con­ces­sion, the Chi­nese […]

The EU is said to be ready to offer a dis­crim­i­na­to­ry ‘region­al’ trade deal to the coun­tries of Mer­co­sur (the Latin Amer­i­can region­al group) that includes expand­ed access to Euro­pean mar­kets for farm goods in return for reduced pres­sure on Europe’s agri­cul­tur­al poli­cies in the WTO nego­ti­a­tions. bq. The move is designed to weak­en pres­sure […]

The “Aus­tralian Sur­vey of Social Attitudes”:http://assda224-100.anu.edu.au/nesstarlight/index.jsp has pub­lished a data­base of fre­quen­cy tables for answers to their 2003 atti­tude sur­vey on a vari­ety of top­ics. The sur­vey shows Aus­tralians to be (along with oth­er ten­den­cies) xeno­pho­bic about invest­ment, appre­hen­sive about for­eign com­peti­ton for jobs and more than a lit­tle pro­tec­tion­ist. But they are equal­ly avid […]