Peter Gallagher

Small changes in the dis­tri­b­u­tion of votes in each coun­try would have seen very dif­fer­ent out­comes. bq. In the United States, the Pres­i­dent won 51% of the pop­u­lar vote but the out­come was deter­mined by a major­ity of Elec­toral Col­lege that was due, finally, to the results in Ohio. There, the Bush­mar­gin was 130,000 votes; …

China is pro­gres­sively under­min­ing the penalty pro­vi­sions of its WTO pro­to­col of acces­sion that allow other coun­tries to use prej­u­di­cial anti-dumping rules on imports from China. It’s time for Aus­tralia to offer the same recog­ni­tion to our num­ber three trad­ing part­ner bq. The deci­sion fol­lows a two-day visit to Buenos Aires by Hu Jin­tao, China’s …

Why not? After all, he’s thought­ful, charm­ing, resource­ful, opin­ion­ated and inclined to lead: qual­i­ties that recent DG’s have not had in the same mea­sure. bq. Out­go­ing Euro­pean Union Trade Com­mis­sioner Pas­cal Lamy said Thurs­day he might con­sider a bid to become the next direc­tor gen­eral of the World Trade Organ­i­sa­tion. “I’m not say­ing that I …

The brief “report in the Finan­cial Times”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/33f976e6-338a-11d9-b07e-00000e2511c8.html of the panel report dis­guises the real inter­est of this case—which seems to be the first WTO dis­pute deal­ing with access to an e-Commerce mar­ket. There are sev­eral aspects to the case that war­rant close atten­tion to the Appeal that the USA is cer­tain to launch. # The …

The USA and EU nego­ti­ated a belts and braces set of tem­po­rary pro­tec­tion mea­sures that China was forced to accept as part of the price of join­ing the WTO in 2001. The China Pro­to­col of Acces­sion pro­vides both a textile/clothing-specific safeguard—available until 2009—and a broader safe­guard for all prod­ucts includ­ing tex­tiles and cloth­ing that is …

A sec­ond Bush admin­is­tra­tion is very likely to have the same trade out­look as the first, although it will be man­aged by dif­fer­ent peo­ple. The top pri­or­ity for Bush bis is likely, again, to be bilat­eral agree­ments: par­tic­u­larly the stymied “Free Trade Agree­ment of the Americas”:http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000086&sid=aH.CDWWFiZIE. This will be, like all such regional trade agree­ments, …