Posts tagged…Wto
Rotten ideas about the renminbi
Thu, Mar 18 2010The prospect of a U.S.-China clash over currency controls next month when the U.S. Treasury Secretary is supposed to pronounce on China's 'currency manipulation' has prompted hyperbolic fears (Martin Wolf, in the FT says he "wonders whether the open global economy is going to survive..."!) and at least two feeble plans.
One is from the IMF, which wants a new mandate—although it admits that's not…
Read more…Trade-war not likely
Mon, Mar 15 2010Precisely
"Taking a legal case over exchange rate misalignments to the WTO would probably fail, and take years in any case. The only real route left is to unilaterally slap tariffs on Chinese imports to compensate for alleged currency undervaluation. That would be a nuclear option that really could spark the destruction of the postwar world trading system, and it doesn’t look like the US is…
EU ramps up farm subsidies
Thu, Feb 11 2010
Yow!
"The latest official notification to the WTO shows that total EU support levels have returned to levels not seen since the previous decade, with €90.7 billion of support being reported to the global trade body for 2006/2007 - up from €75.6 billion in 2002, when support was at its lowest in the last fifteen years." Extract from ICTSDSo-called 'Green' box subsidies were growing dramatically…
Are the BRICS ready to lead?
Wed, Jan 20 2010
Reflecting on the greater influence of the BRICS, recently, in global forums, the always-interesting Alan Beattie asks:
"Is this a pivot point such as the second world war, where the confident, innovative US muscled aside the weakened, debt-laden economies of Europe and remade the global financial architecture? " Extract from FT.com
His guess? "No, not yet". He points out the BRICS are…
Elaborating the Ag. travesty
Thu, Jan 14 2010It is difficult to believe that the complex, weak, confusing, rent-preserving, ponderous white-elephant being proposed for an agreement on agriculture in the WTO Doha negotiations could be more bloated or further compromised…but that's exactly what seems to be happening.
According to a report* from ITCSD, developing countries and the EU want to further slow the pace of change where opening…
Lamy’s assessment of Copenhagen
Thu, Jan 14 2010It's called whistling in the wind.
"The outcome of the conference in Copenhagen represents a step forward. The Kyoto Protocol addresses about 30% of global carbon emissions. In contrast, the framework accord hammered out in Copenhagen last week may encompass the majority of world emissions. " Extract from WTO | 2009 News items - Lamy praises Copenhagen efforts, calls for more to be done
The…
Multilateralism not a ‘single undertaking’
Wed, Jan 06 2010More commentary—this time from the President of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations—on the significance of the Copenhagen meeting as one of the first signs of whatever-it-turns-out-to-be that follows the pax atlantica
"Multilateralism in the 21st century is, like the century itself, likely to be more fluid and, at times, messy than what we are used to." Extract from Richard Haass in the Global governance in the aughties Sun, Dec 27 2009
First, bodice-ripping as political theory
"We live in an era in which unprecedented globalization and economic interdependence, liberal-democratic hegemony, nanotechnology, robotic warfare, the 'infosphere,' nuclear proliferation and geoengineering solutions to climate change coexist with the return of powerful autocratic-capitalist states, of a new Great Game in Central Asia, of imperialism in…What explains tariff levels?
Fri, Dec 04 2009
It's not economic policy (or even necessity) as much as the political economy that drives trade policies.
"The relationship between the overall tariff policy (considering all product groups together) and the socio-economic variables is even more diffuse, and no strong relationship emerges between tariff policy clusters and the socio-economic context. Consequently, we can conclude that trade…Will the G-20 save Doha?
Sun, Sep 27 2009
Probably not. The discount on this, the lastest of their promises, is deservedly steep according to the Global Trade Alert website.
It's not a problem of mendacity or lack of 'political courage'. There is simply no consensus on the liberalizing mandate of Doha among this group; we've tested that proposition to exhaustion in the past eight years. The G20 is effectively the same group that has been…
Modeling a Doha agreement on agriculture
Tue, Jul 07 2009
To conclude my series of posts on modeling a critical mass agreement on agriculture, I would like to show you how I set up UNCTAD's Agricultural Trade Policy Simulation Model (ATPSM) to project the economic impacts of an agreement to liberalize agricultural trade based on WTO's December, 2008, draft 'modalities'. In my previous post, I compared the results of this simulation with the results of…
Critical mass agreement vs the Doha Round
Thu, Jul 02 2009
We'll cut to the chase, shall we, in this fourth of my posts on modeling the impact of a 'critical mass' agreement in agriculture? Click on the tags at the left-side or at the bottom of this article to find the earlier posts.
A 'critical mass' agreement among 38 countries that account for 80 percent of world trade in the 30 top-traded agricultural products (all of them food) to eliminate import…
