As of today, the WTO Appellate Body will be, at least temporarily, no more. The Trump Administration has strangled it by refusing to agree to appoint new members. This can be seen as an extension, albeit an extreme one, of positions taken in prior Administrations, including the Obama Administration. This blog explains various ways the…
The World Trade Organization’s dispute system was once lauded as an important advancement in trade law enforcement. Now it appears that the system’s legal backbone has been broken. If the dispute system cannot be salvaged from the current crisis, it’s worth asking: what do we lose? Answering that question means putting politics aside an taking…
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 following is an executive summary of a paper submitted to the Institute for Corporate Governance and Finance Conference A New Deal for a New Century: Making Our Economy Work for All. Papers for the conference, including the full version of the summary below, can be found here. Too often, the debate over trade devolves into tribalist…
Who said the following: many . . . have focused in particular on enforcement of labor and environmental provisions . . . . I am pleased that we obtained strong provisions in those areas, and I agree that they should be fully and effectively enforced so that our companies can compete based on…
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…
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…
The Op-Ed can be found here.
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…
A previous blog explained that: the U.S. willingness to be the market of last resort has been a component critical to the functioning of the global trading system; the U.S. ability to serve as the market of last resort has been compromised by WTO overreach; and no other WTO Member seems to be willing to shoulder…