Monthly Archives: December 2008

Professors prosecute protectionism

Two of the best aca­d­e­mic ana­lysts of the global trade sys­tem, Simon Evenett and Richard Bald­win, have rushed out an ‘e-book’ enti­tled “What world lead­ers must do to halt the spread of pro­tec­tion­ism”, con­tain­ing brief pre­scrip­tions by six­teen pro­fes­sors and an indus­tri­al­ist. A pow­er­ful line-up. “Free” (as in beer). Deserves your atten­tion and reflection.

December 6, 2008 – 7:41 am | By pwg | Posted in Trade | Tagged , | Comments (0)

A better way to negotiate on agriculture

Next week, at the Insti­tute for Inter­na­tional Trade in Ade­laide, Andrew Stoler (Insti­tute Direc­tor, for­mer Deputy Director-General of WTO) and I are pre­sent­ing a con­fer­ence in our project on future frame­works for WTO agri­cul­ture agreements.

In addi­tion to our own research (some linked here) we’ve com­mis­sioned the help of lead­ing agri­cul­ture and trade pol­icy research cen­ters in Brazil, China, India and Indone­sia to help us exam­ine the polit­i­cal econ­omy of the WTO agri­cul­ture nego­ti­a­tions. We’ve also ben­e­fited from com­ments from sev­eral of the world’s lead­ing ana­lysts of agri­cul­tural trade poli­cies; sum­ma­rized in our ‘Work in Progress’ paper pro­duced for the conference.

We are espe­cially inter­ested in test­ing an hypoth­e­sis first raised by the War­wick Com­mis­sion about the value of so-called crit­i­cal mass agree­ments as an adjunct to—or even as one of sev­eral sub­sti­tutes for—the WTO’s sin­gle under­tak­ing.

Below: an extract from our Work In Progress report that asks whether recent dis­cov­er­ies about the rapid growth of intra-industry trade in food prod­ucts sug­gests that CM agree­ments for food might be a good bet as a road to future market-opening agreements.

December 4, 2008 – 10:22 pm | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

Anti-NAFTA Congressman for U.S. Trade Rep?

An expe­ri­enced Mem­ber of the Ways and Means trade sub­com­mit­tee, another Cal­i­forn­ian lawyer (a pro­fes­sion that has not dis­tin­guished itself in the Trade Representative’s office, except by a take-no-prisoners advo­cacy), Xavier Becerra sounds pretty much what Obama promised dur­ing his campaign:

“Becerra did orig­i­nally sup­port NAFTA, but he has apol­o­gized for this and worked to oppose CAFTA, giv­ing Bush fast-track author­ity for trade agree­ments, and grant­ing China MFN…[He] has an 87% life­time rat­ing from the AFL-CIO. It’s not an A, but it’s still pretty good.”  extract from: Daily Kos

‘Good’ of course is some­thing that ‘Daily Kos’ and I will never agree on. I hope that this story is not true, but I fear oth­er­wise because Obama advo­cated these same views dur­ing the cam­paign. Let’s still hope that those peo­ple who argued Obama’s tired old anti-trade stump rhetoric would change once he was in office are right. But it doesn’t look that way right now.

Thanks to Ben Muse for this link.

December 4, 2008 – 6:01 pm | By pwg | Posted in Trade | Tagged | Comments (0)

Suppose the SWFs got cold feet?

“‘Right now we don’t have the courage to invest in finan­cial insti­tu­tions because we don’t know what prob­lems we will put our­selves into,’ Lou Jiwei [Chair­man of China Invest­ment Corp] said on Wednes­day. ‘My con­fi­dence should come from gov­ern­ment poli­cies. But if they are chang­ing every week, how can you expect that to make me con­fi­dent?”  extract from: Finan­cial Times

December 4, 2008 – 7:38 am | By pwg | Posted in Trade | Tagged , , | Comments (0)