Peter Gallagher

Com­ing soon… a guide to trade advo­cacy. A prac­ti­cal self-paced course on how to make an impact on trade poli­cies and on the trad­ing sys­tem that draws on my expe­ri­ence work­ing with busi­ness orga­ni­za­tions in Africa, Asia and Latin Amer­ica. Please “let me know”:http://www.petergallagher.com.au/contact/ if you’d like to be advised of avail­abil­ity. Every deci­sion taken …

Viet­nam, like China, is using WTO acces­sion as a means of ‘forc­ing the pace’ on tran­si­tion from a social­ist econ­omy to a mixed-economy, still under the guid­ance of the Party (or that’s the the­ory). In other words, Viet­nam will use an exter­nal pol­icy trans­for­ma­tion to lever­age the domes­tic agenda: I can’t help admir­ing their ambi­tion. …

New Zealand is right to com­plain to WTO about Aus­tralian quar­an­tine pro­ce­dures that have kept the hum­ble Kiwi apple out of Aus­tralian shops for almost a cen­tury. The Aus­tralian government‚Äîunder press­sure from yet another highly pro­tected grow­ers’ group‚Äîhas repeat­edly delayed a final deci­sion on “its own assessment”:http://www.affa.gov.au/content/output.cfm?ObjectID=D51B9649-3692-4F76-919200A78D716CA2 in late 2000 that a ban on imports …

A few arti­cles I’ve been read­ing recently that put China’s trade growth in per­spec­tive. China’s trade growth rates are not higher than Japan’s or the Asian ‘tiger’ economies dur­ing their peri­ods of most rapid growth. China is also the world’s third biggest importer although there is still a lot of growth poten­tial in it’s shares …

Mil­ton Fried­man and his wife Rose, who must surely have heard more than their share of wise­cracks about two econ­o­mists and three opin­ions, observed that “Ever since Adam Smith there has been vir­tual una­nim­ity among econ­o­mists, what­ever their ide­o­log­i­cal posi­tion on other issues, that inter­na­tional free trade is in the best inter­ests of trad­ing coun­tries …

The sur­prise with­drawal of all Chi­nese export tar­iffs on tex­tiles, just a day or so after dra­matic increases were announced, sug­gests that the Chi­nese are now nego­ti­at­ing with them­selves I “thought”:http://www.inquit.com/article/429/us-and-eu-quotas-to-force-up-world-clothing-price the Chi­nese move was clever, and no more cyn­i­cal than the pol­icy of the U.S. and E.U. on gar­ment imports. But … bq. “The …