Peter Gallagher

“No”, says this story from the Economist:ASEAN trade with China has grown faster than inter­nal trade under the pref­er­en­tia tar­iff. bq. No one knows what pro­por­tion of trade within ASEAN actu­ally takes advan­tage of the Com­mon Effec­tive Pref­er­en­tial Tar­iff, as the AFTA-mandated rates are known. Some esti­mates put the fig­ure as low as 5 per­cent. …

The pro­posed basis for agree­ment on the key topic of Agri­cul­ture has been distributed—at the very last moment (Fri­day morn­ing in Geneva). Ambas­sador Grosser’s sec­ond attempt is more vague on mar­ket access and on the manip­u­la­tion of the ‘blue box’ of domes­tic sup­ports. But it now has greater­sym­me­try between the dero­ga­tions avail­able to indus­tri­al­ized and …

    The NY Times It’s 1953 and you’re the anony­mous NY Times cor­re­spon­dent who’s detailed to report the dis­cov­ery by James Wat­son and Frank Crick of the double-helical struc­ture of DNA. You have a hun­dred words to ‘grab’ the reader, name the dis­cov­er­ers, con­vey the impor­tance of their dis­cov­ery and tie the story some­how to the US …

The US has announced smaller than expected pre­lim­i­nary anti-dumping duties on imports of shrimp from Thai­land, India, Ecuador and Brazil. bq. The duties will affect imports that last year were worth nearly $1.7bn (€1.4bn, £933m), and come on top of tar­iffs imposed ear­lier this month against shrimp imports from Viet­nam and China worth more than …

Greedy con­tempt for con­sumers’ choice in the pro­tec­tion of closed hard­ware is increas­ingly com­mon. bq. On Thurs­day how­ever Apple warned that it may also block access to iPod using Har­mony the next time it updates the soft­ware used to run the device. “It is highly likely that Real’s Har­mony tech­nol­ogy will cease to work with cur­rent …

From the Demo­c­ra­tic Party con­ven­tion, Matthew Ygle­sias (thanks, “Ben”:http://www.acsalaska.net/~benmuse/blog/2004_07_01_archive.html#109105125287819611) offers us half a piece of com­fort: bq. Laura Tyson is, as we speak, assur­ing us that a Kerry admin­is­tra­tion will not break with Bush-Clinton-Bushpursuit of mul­ti­lat­eral trade and invest­ment agree­ments. (“Matthew Yglesias”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/07/notes_on_tyson_.html) Ygle­sias inter­prets this assur­ance as mean­ing that “Kerry would be bet­ter for free …

I’m sorry to see that Mar­tin Wolf has joined the casan­dras warn­ing us of the immense harm to the WTO sys­tem if Mem­bers fail to reach agree­ment on a nego­ti­at­ing frame­work this week. I doubt that there is much dan­ger to the sys­tem, although there may be a dan­ger to the cur­rent EU offer on …