Peter Gallagher

Hit with a brick could sum­ma­rize this story. The WTO Dis­pute Panel report con­demn­ing US Cot­ton Sub­si­dies is 3cm thick and weighs more than a kilo. Key points: some mar­ket­ing sup­ports built into the 2002 Farm Bill are ille­gal export sub­si­dies that must be elim­i­nated. Some income sup­ports in the Farm Bill that the USA …

This speech is impor­tant, if you’re inter­ested in the prob­lems of global gov­er­nance. It’s an inter­est­ing, typ­i­cally intel­lec­tual, part­ing shot from one of Europe’s bright­est and most expe­ri­enced pub­lic ser­vants. Lamy’s argu­ment doesn’t suc­ceed, in my view, because he jumps too eas­ily from a descrip­tion of the suc­cess with which WTO has han­dled this chal­lenge …

Robert Got­tlieb­sen, The Australian’s busi­ness colum­nist, is ring­ing alarm bells over Sen­a­tor Kerry’s threat to attack US tax incen­tives for for­eign direct invest­ment and ‘off­shoring’. But the incen­tives are only a small frac­tion of the US income from for­eign direct invest­ment; their with­drawal would be unlikely to impact China and India at all. Got­tlieb­sen quotes …

Some bomb­shells in this round up of world trade data and recent think­ing on global eco­nomic pol­icy. Don’t be fooled by the bland exte­rior: there are chap­ters on the role of eff­fec­tive gov­ern­ment in trade suc­cess (enforce­abil­ity of con­tracts is a good proxy), the role of inter­na­tional car­tels in theim­port prices paid by devel­op­ing coun­tries …

Australia’s second-biggest brewer was chased out of the Chi­nese mar­ket by com­pe­ti­tion for mar­ket share and the dif­fi­culty of man­ag­ing a distribution-based busi­ness in China Accord­ing to “The Age”:http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/07/29/1091080377632.html?from=storylhs Lion Nathan’s three brew­eries in the Yangtze River delta increased sales vol­umes by an astound­ing 63 per cent in the six months to March 31 but …

Four ‘to do’ items listed by a top offi­cial of China’s trade and invest­ment pro­mo­tion agency for a vis­it­ing US del­e­ga­tion. Com­peti­tors take note. The China Coun­cil for the Pro­mo­tion of Inter­na­tional Trade (CCPIT) pro­motes trade and invest­ment in both direc­tions. It’s “website”:http://www.ccpit.org/servlet/org.servlet.en.OrgWebEn?actionType=Home&OrgId=1 is an essen­tial port of call for any­one look­ing for the offi­cial …

Not even a com­bi­na­tion of dis­as­ters have stopped the trend to global inte­gra­tion. Fas­ci­nat­ing data just released from the A T Kearny sur­vey of global inte­gra­tion in 2002 shows that the world net­works of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, per­sonal con­tact and polit­i­cal engage­ment grew stronger despite a con­tin­ued fall in for­eign invest­ment and for­eign travel in that year. …