Trade policy is back on the political radar, it seems. The NYT is covering it, at least. Pascal Lamy met with Tim Geithner and Ron Kirk today.
Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
Obama and trade
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010What is Obama’s trade strategy?
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010Describing the USTR’s willingness to write a trans-Pacific PTA from scratch, Simon Lester says “I feel like we are getting close to seeing what the Obama trade folks have in mind for this one part of trade policy.”
When will find out what the Obama administration plans for any part of trade policy? I’ve stopped tracking day-to-day trade politics, so maybe I missed it, but I haven’t seen anything from the Obama folks about their plan for global economic engagement. Competitive liberalization may have been a bad idea, but at least the Bush administration made their strategy clear.
Is the US likely to double its exports?
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010In last week’s State of the Union, President Obama said:
Third, we need to export more of our goods. Because the more products we make and sell to other countries, the more jobs we support right here in America. So…
So tonight, we set a new goal: We will double our exports over the next five years, an increase that will support 2 million jobs in America.
To help meet this goal, we’re launching a National Export Initiative that will help farmers and small businesses increase their exports and reform export controls consistent with national security. We have to seek new markets aggressively, just as our competitors are. If America sits on the sidelines while other nations sign trade deals, we will lose the chance to create jobs on our shores.
But realizing those benefits also means enforcing those agreements so our trading partners play by the rules. And that’s why we’ll continue to shape a Doha trade agreement that opens global markets and why we will strengthen our trade relations in Asia and with key partners like South Korea, and Panama, and Colombia.
U.S. exports have not doubled in dollar terms during a five-year period since the inflation-plagued 1970s, not exactly a golden era for the U.S. economy. In real terms, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, exports have not come close to doubling during any five-year stretch in the past 40 years. The fastest growth in inflation-adjusted exports came in the second half of the 1980s, when they grew by two-thirds from 1985 to 1990.
Addendum: Menzie Chinn focuses on nominal exports in a long post that concludes:
So, if you didn’t know it already, achieving the goal of doubling nominal exports depends upon exchange rate pass through, the extent of exchange rate depreciation, the rate of rest-of-world GDP growth, and the evolution of export supply (of both goods and services).
Madagascar’s textile firms lobby for AGOA preferences
Friday, December 18th, 2009From page 7 of today’s Politico:
That’s the top of an advertisement paid for by the owners of apparel factories in Madagascar and one of their American investor partners, lobbying the US to extend AGOA preferences for textile exports. 28,000 workers signed the petition.
See Aid Watchers for the full story. Here’s an academic piece on foreign lobbying and US trade policy.
Obama and regressive tariffs
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009Dan Griswold argues that Barack Obama’s trade policy is regressive.
Economist: “Barack Obama and free trade: Economic vandalism”
Saturday, September 19th, 2009Contra Doug Irwin, the Economist is quite pessimistic about President Obama’s tire tariffs: “A protectionist move that is bad politics, bad economics, bad diplomacy and hurts America. Did we miss anything?”
One might argue that these tariffs don’t matter much. They apply, after all, only to imports worth a couple of billion dollars last year, hardly the stuff of a great trade war… Presidents, after all, sometimes have to throw a bit of red meat to their supporters: Mr Obama needs to keep the unions on side to help his health-reform bill.
That view seems naive. It is not just that workers in all sorts of other industries that have suffered at the hands of Chinese competitors will now be emboldened to seek the same kind of protection from a president who has given in to the unions at the first opportunity. The tyre decision needs to be set into the context of a string of ominously protectionist policies which started within weeks of the inauguration with a nasty set of “Buy America” provisions for public-works contracts. The president watered these down a bit, but was not brave enough to veto. Next, the president stayed silent as Congress shut down a project that was meant to lead to the opening of the border to Mexican trucks, something promised in the NAFTA agreement of 1994. Besides these sins of commission sit the sins of omission: the president has done nothing at all to advance the three free-trade packages that are pending in Congress, with Colombia, Panama and South Korea, three solid American allies who deserve much better. And much more serious than that, because it affects the whole world, is his failure to put anything worthwhile on the table to help revive the moribund Doha round of trade talks. Mr Bush’s tariffs, like the Reagan-era export restraints on Japanese cars and semiconductors, came from a president who was fundamentally committed to free trade. Mr Obama’s, it seems, do not.
One might argue that these tariffs don’t matter much. They apply, after all, only to imports worth a couple of billion dollars last year, hardly the stuff of a great trade war… Presidents, after all, sometimes have to throw a bit of red meat to their supporters: Mr Obama needs to keep the unions on side to help his health-reform bill.
That view seems naive. It is not just that workers in all sorts of other industries that have suffered at the hands of Chinese competitors will now be emboldened to seek the same kind of protection from a president who has given in to the unions at the first opportunity. The tyre decision needs to be set into the context of a string of ominously protectionist policies which started within weeks of the inauguration with a nasty set of “Buy America” provisions for public-works contracts. The president watered these down a bit, but was not brave enough to veto. Next, the president stayed silent as Congress shut down a project that was meant to lead to the opening of the border to Mexican trucks, something promised in the NAFTA agreement of 1994. Besides these sins of commission sit the sins of omission: the president has done nothing at all to advance the three free-trade packages that are pending in Congress, with Colombia, Panama and South Korea, three solid American allies who deserve much better. And much more serious than that, because it affects the whole world, is his failure to put anything worthwhile on the table to help revive the moribund Doha round of trade talks. Mr Bush’s tariffs, like the Reagan-era export restraints on Japanese cars and semiconductors, came from a president who was fundamentally committed to free trade. Mr Obama’s, it seems, do not.
The secret US-Russia trade agreement
Tuesday, August 4th, 2009Reasonable people may differ on how much secrecy is needed for ongoing trade negotiations. But I have never heard any argument to justify why a trade agreement signed by the United States should remain a secret from the American people.
USTR on status of unimplemented PTAs
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009Steve Charnovitz notes that the USTR is blaming Congress for not passing trade agreements the President has not yet submitted to Congress.
USTR secrecy (or indifference or incompetence)
Monday, July 20th, 2009The US Trade Representative is not very good at responding to requests for information. Aid agencies don’t seem too good at responding to requests either.
Obama’s upcoming trade speech
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009Doug Palmer: “Obama is expected to deliver a speech in the coming weeks or months outlining his views on trade. White House officials provide no date for that speech, but analysts hope it will signal the start of a more aggressive administration effort to win approval of the pending trade deals and to reinvigorate the Doha round of world trade talks, now in its eighth year.”
