June 19, 2007
Muse on KORUS
Ben Muse has cemented his blogosphere dominance of Korea-US FTA coverage by setting up a blog dedicated to the trade deal.
Posted by Dingel at 12:52 PM | Comments (0)
June 08, 2007
Weekend reading
My exams are next week, but after that I promise a return to actual blogging -- more than mere links and excerpts!
In the meantime, you might enjoy:
Dan Drezner & others discussing global governance at Cato Unbound.
A Business Week story on measuring productivity gains in the presence of offshoring: "But new evidence suggests that shifting production overseas has inflicted worse damage on the U.S. economy than the numbers show. BusinessWeek has learned of a gaping flaw in the way statistics treat offshoring, with serious economic and political implications. Top government statisticians now acknowledge that the problem exists, and say it could prove to be significant." [HT: Thoma]
VoxEU, a new portal from the CEPR featuring numerous top economists, including recent columns by Paul Collier & Tony Venables, Andrew K. Rose, Simon Evenett, and others.
Posted by Dingel at 01:43 PM | Comments (0)
May 10, 2007
Light blogging ahead
The recent downturn in posting has been due to my upcoming exams. I'll continue to post links and snippets over the next few weeks, but it's unlikely that I'll have time for lengthy pieces. Full-scale Trade Diversion will resume in mid-June. Thanks for reading.
Posted by Dingel at 08:56 PM | Comments (0)
January 06, 2007
Open thread
It's a new year - care to suggest a resolution that I should adopt for Trade Diversion? If you've got thoughts about topics I should (or shouldn't cover) or other suggestions for the blog, please leave a comment or email me. Thanks!
Posted by Dingel at 05:46 PM | Comments (0)
October 23, 2006
We're back
I apologize for the service outage over the weekend. Those responsible have been sacked.
Posted by Dingel at 08:08 AM | Comments (1)
June 07, 2006
Should I blog while in grad school?
I was at an exciting seminar for the last five days without internet access, but I should have a few interesting items to post about in the near future.
I'm starting an M.Phil. in Economics in the fall. At this point, I plan to continue blogging while in grad school, because I think that it's complementary to research activities. Studying might reduce my (already light) bogging activity, but I see no reason to give up Trade Diversion entirely. Is anyone aware of grad students that have opined about the value of blogging in comparison to the opportunity costs?
Posted by Dingel at 08:48 PM | Comments (3)
May 24, 2006
Apologies for the Brief Hiatus
Between taking finals, graduating, packing, repacking, moving to a new city, and starting an internship, I've been too busy to post anything of consequence. I should be back in another week or so.
In the meantime, Tyler Cowen points to an interesting abstract on variables influencing a paper's likelihood of being cited.
Posted by Dingel at 05:42 PM | Comments (0)
February 13, 2006
A response to critics regarding my Bulletin letter
My writing is "surprisingly naive and highly superficial," to such a degree that it is obvious that I have "limited knowledge of global economics," according to a pair of Canadian fair trade activists. They're responding to a fairly conservative piece on the WTO that I published in my college newspaper in December. I find their tone disrespectful, but it would be unwise to fail to respond to published criticism of my opinions, so here are a few excerpts from their posts and my rebuttal.
Free trade causes poverty... there is no way you can lift protection without hurting people.
Trade liberalization hurts those factors of production earning economic rent in previously protected sectors. Every economist acknowledges this. In fact, the purpose of liberalization is to encourage the shifting of resources amongst production activities so as to achieve gains from comparative advantage. But saying that free trade causes a few job losses by improving allocative efficiency is very different than saying free trade causes poverty. Trade liberalization hurts some people, but it creates more winners than losers. The burden of proof lies with those opposing trade.
Also, there is an unfortunate misunderstanding because of the term "Fair trade" that has multiple meanings.
My piece particularly criticizes those who claim the global trading system is patently unfair and that the rules are "rigged" against the poor. I focused upon Oxfam because that is the group that is active at Gonzaga.
On the other (dark) side, take a magnifying glass to Walmart: just how many trillion dollars of profit is required to claim success? And at what cost to human dignity? Their profits, earned off the backs of abused 3rd world workers in 2004 were double the GDP of Denmark.
Wal-Mart's gross profit is $68 billion, not trillions. Moreover, attempts at comparing corporations and countries are bunk, as Martin Wolf explains here. GDP measures value-added, while revenue measures total value.
My opinion of "abuse" depends upon whether you mean physical abuse or merely low-wages. I don't know which you're implying.
Finally, a plug for a wonderful independent film that is both highly entertaining and life changing in the sense that it demonstrates a feisty response to injustice. The Yes Men
I've seen it, thanks.
Most economists are patently insane... what most people don't realize is that GDP growth increases with every murder, cancer victim, or robbery (which, for example, adds 'economic activity' to law enforcement agencies, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies & insurance companies, respectively)
Economists have been familiar with the broken window fallacy since Frederic Bastiat exposed it in the eighteenth century. I have a history of criticizing economists who think that hurricanes or tsunamis are good for growth. I have difficulty imagining a development economist recommending murders, cancer, and robberies as routes to promoting growth, so why voice this objection?
many 'people' do support "unfair trade" - they are called "corporations"
The WTO's liberalization serves to eliminate rent-seeking opportunities, including those enjoyed by corporations.
the WTO is NOT "an exercise in international democracy" it's a neoliberal sham that favours corporate profits over human rights” plutocracy at it's finest
I stand by my original claim:
The WTO is an exercise in international democracy - since its trade agreements require a consensus to take effect, each member nation holds a veto. The walkouts by developing nations at Seattle in 1999 and Cancun in 2003 reflect their negotiating muscle. While the WTO has its flaws, it remains a viable trade liberalization mechanism for both developed and developing countries, as demonstrated by Brazil's cotton subsidy victory against the United States at the organization's dispute settlement panel.
The vast majority of poor countries who are "importers of agricultural products" don't necessarily want to be importing subsidized agricultural crops from the EU/US that put farmers in developing countries out of work, which leads to increasing dependence on imported crops, which leads to food insecurity.
Thanks to the EU's Everything But Arms program, LDCs are able to receive protectionism-inflated prices for their exports while importing food at subsidized prices. As Arvind Panagariya has repeatedly explained, that means that the end of market distortions in agricultural subsidies will be a terms-of-trade deterioration for LDCs. That won't improve agricultural employment.
As for food security, it's not obvious to me why poor countries would find importation to be an unreliable method of procuring agricultural products.
I suspect Jonathan Dingel has limited knowledge of global economics... even though economists are
patently insane.
I'm afraid that my letter to the editor was limited to 600 words, but I have a feeling that a longer piece would have done little to change your mind.
Gonzaga student Simon Zachary offered a much less insulting reply. I responded in last Friday's Bulletin.
Posted by Dingel at 10:41 PM | Comments (2)
December 09, 2005
What should I do next summer?
I have yet to decide what to do this summer after I graduate. One option would be to work as an intern or research assistant at an institute focusing on development and trade topics. If you have suggestions about where I should apply for such a position, or other ideas about how to best spend my summer between undergraduate and graduate studies, please leave a comment. Thanks!
Posted by Dingel at 04:30 PM | Comments (0)
November 09, 2005
My Ongoing Hiatus
I apologize for the lack of posts over the last month. Without declaring an official hiatus, I've been neglecting the blog in order to focus upon my graduate school applications and some research work. I anticipate that the neglect will continue until Christmas.
If that leaves your appetite for trade and development blogging unsatiated, some of the best posts I've read lately have been from Jim at Our Word Is Our Weapon. Check him out.
Posted by Dingel at 10:26 AM | Comments (1)
July 21, 2005
The Diversion Begins...
Welcome to my new blogging home.
I took a month-long mid-summer break from the blogosphere. Although I missed the opportunity to blog about topics such as CAFTA's congressional battles, the Live8 concert, and the abolition of US cotton subsidies, I think the hiatus was beneficial. Taking a break promoted thinking about the topics that I cover from a perspective uninfluenced by a temptation to blog about them. Now I'm back and ready to offer fresh commentary.
Why the new location? I'm still the same author and the content will be similar in focus. The new blog merely better reflects what I do; the old blog title implied that I'd be discussing sweatshops and labor conditions in developing countries, but, as I blogged, my interest shifted away from debunking anti-globalization arguments. This new blog title reflects my interest in agricultural subsidies, preferential market access and other issues that are not nearly as black-and-white as whether the low wage jobs MNCs provide in poor countries are preferable to imposing US-level labor standards.
Plus, everyone loves a bad pun. Thanks for reading.
Posted by Dingel at 11:38 PM | Comments (1)