The House Ways and Means Committee held a hearing last Tuesday with two trade topics: the WTO Appellate Body and NAFTA 2.0. The first half of the hearing was devoted to the Appellate Body, including both support for the U.S. government’s longstanding concerns over the flaws with the dispute settlement system, as well as a…
We’ve talked about one loophole in NAFTA called “de minimis.” In addition to rules of origin that already allow a certain amount of content originating from outside the region, the original NAFTA contains a loophole that allows an extra 7% on top of it. The Trump Administration, in a position completely at odds with its China…
The recent furor over the NBA, South Park, and the long arm of the Chinese Communist Party is giving the average American a much better understanding of Chinese government authoritarianism in action. Until now, the discussion about the relationship between China and the United States had been dominated by pearl-clutching over how much more dog…
Typically, trade agreement marketers rely on gains to GDP to explain why the agreements are worth doing. (Of course, in 2016 the U.S. International Trade Commission concluded that all these bilateral and regional trade agreements combined added a mere .2% per year to GDP.) Herein lies the conundrum: the existing NAFTA already provides duty-free treatment among…
On June 6, Inside Cybersecurity had a webinar of government and American industry voices to discuss Huawei, 5G, and cybersecurity. The panelists’ main concern is the myriad ways hostile actors, including state actors, can exploit supply chains to engage in nefarious activities. Huawei, which has a prominent position in the race to 5G thanks to Chinese government…
Much has been made of the TPP and NAFTA chapters on state-owned enterprises (SOEs). They are supposed to be forward-looking provisions that will put a dent in state capitalism. But the premise is wrong, and so the response is wrong. The premise of the argument is that state capitalism is executed through SOEs. In some…
According to Politico, a “coalition of free-market advocacy, business and nonprofit groups is urging the leaders of the Senate Finance Committee to press forward on new legislation curbing the president’s tariff authority.” Ah, the siren song of the free market. But does anyone really think the global trading system is characterized by “free” markets? A…
Donald Trump campaigned in part on the flaws in the auto rules of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Much of his renegotiation of NAFTA has focused on tightening up those rules. As this paper explains, he can rightly claim some credit for strengthening them. But there are nevertheless questions about whether those rules will work the way…
To situate the ongoing debate over trade, let’s take a look at some of the key takeaways from Judith Stein’s book Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies. Stein traces the evolution of American trade policy from Nixon to Clinton, and in particular she identifies choices that were made, across successive…
There isn’t one. Contrary to the prevailing narrative, the pain didn’t start when the United States imposed tariffs on our trading partners. The pain started much earlier. When, exactly, doesn’t necessarily matter, though we can focus on China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), its subsequent skirting of the rules, the WTO’s insistence on…