• 13 May: Summer conferences: Schedules for Princeton IES and NBER ITI are up. http://www.princeton.edu/~ies/workshop.htm & http://users.nber.org/~confer/2013/SI2013/ITI/itiprg.html
• 12 May: World trade: Fresh blood http://econ.st/10uiFGB “The fate of the WTO’s Doha round is in the hands of two new trade officials” @TheEconomist
• 12 May: Kiminori Matsuyama’s symmetry-breaking model of endogenous comparative advantage is forthcoming in Econometrica: http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~kmatsu/
• 10 May: John Taylor relays rumors that “World Bank will water down or even abandon its ten-year old Doing Business” measures. http://johnbtaylorsblog.blogspot.com/2013/05/10-years-doing-business-measuring.html

In summary, this is at once an ambitious, provocative, and provoking book-ambitious in the breadth and depth of the problems in trade theory it propounds and seeks to solve, provocative in the hypotheses it propounds, and provoking on account both of the perverse misinterpretations of existing theory that the author produces to support his claims to novelty and of the careless botch he makes of the exposition of his own alternative theories. The result is a volume that ought to be read by specialists looking for seminal ideas and interesting research problems,but that cannot be recommended for use by students insufficiently trained to be alert to the substitution of emotive debating points for reasoned argument and of irrelevance for logical analysis. [Economica, 1964]

If trade barriers are managed by inefficient institutions, trade liberalization can lead to greater-than-expected gains. We examine Chinese textile and clothing exports before and after the elimination of externally imposed export quotas. Both the surge in export volume and the decline in export prices following quota removal are driven by net entry. This outcome is inconsistent with a model in which quotas are allocated based on firm productivity, implying misallocation of resources. Removing this misallocation accounts for a substantial share of the overall gain in productivity associated with quota removal.

This month, a working group led by EU trade commissioner Karel De Gucht and US trade representative Ron Kirk is likely to suggest starting formal negotiations…

“The stars are almost aligned,” says Greg Slater, director of global trade policy at Intel, the chipmaker. The US and EU “have the opportunity to try to set the gold standard” in areas such as intellectual property protection, he says, which emerging markets like China and India would then have to respect.

Yet the deal faces complex challenges. Trade policy has moved from focusing on simple import tariffs on goods – already low for most transatlantic commerce – to often complicated “behind-the-border” domestic regulation. Technical standards, not tariffs, are the biggest barriers to integrating fast-growing US and European markets such as pharmaceuticals, medical services and advanced electronics…

“The aim in many instances is not to drive immediately for full regulatory convergence but to try to make sure that regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are making decisions with their eyes wide open,” says Sean Heather, vice-president of the [US Chamber of Commerce] chamber’s centre for global regulation. “The idea that negotiators are going to sit down with a big list and say: ‘We’ll give you that if you give us this,’ is probably not going to work for most regulations.”

Yet even agreeing an approach on convergence confronts bureaucratic and philosophical barriers. Regulation in both economies is frequently divided among different agencies, some jealous of their independence and unused to considering international implications.

Walter Russell Mead:

A U.S.-EU trade deal is essentially a way to ignore countries like Brazil and India while crafting rules that will govern some of the high-tech industries and information-based services that play a growing role in US-EU trade. Once those rules are set, the BRICs will be hard pressed to avoid signing onto them later on down the road.

Dan Drezner:

Two things have changed.  First, the traditional method of multilateral trade liberalization has died.  Second, while both the US and EU are major trading states, they’re not quite as pivotal as they used to be.  Ironically, it’s their declining (though still appreciable) importance in global trade that makes a US-EU agreement feasible now.  The BRIC economies are now sufficiently large that a transatlantic trade deal doesn’t seem like an existential threat.

And here’s Richard Baldwin, “Regulatory Protectionism, Developing Nations, and a Two-Tier World Trade System ,” Brookings Trade Forum: 2000.

• In Belgian firm-level data, a smaller percentage of services-producing firms export than goods-producing firms. Exporting entry and exit rates are higher in services than goods.
• Richard Baldwin says that vertical specialization requires global trade governance sufficiently distinct from existing WTO practices that it requires a new organization.
• An optimistic take on the Trans-Pacific Partnership and proposed EU-US trade deal.

• Assaf Zimring (Stanford) – Gains from Trade: Lessons from The 2007-2010 Gaza Blockade
• Qi Zhang (LSE) – Income Distribution and the Price Level: The Balassa-Samuelson Relationship Re-considered
• Hongsong Zhang (PSU) -  Static and Dynamic Gains from Importing Intermediate Inputs: Theory and Evidence
• Christopher Tonetti (NYU) – Equilibrium Technology Diffusion, Trade, and Growth
• Felix Tintelnot (PSU) – Global Production with Export Platforms
• Tomasz Swiecki (Princeton) – Intersectoral Distortions, Structural Change and the Welfare Gains from Trade
• Joseph Shapiro (MIT) – Trade, CO₂, and the Environment
• Fernando Perez Cervantes (Chicago) – Railroads and Economic Growth: A Trade Policy Approach
• Dan Murphy (Michigan) – Why are Goods and Services more Expensive in Rich Countries? Demand Complementarities and Cross-Country Price Differences
• Julien Martin (Louvain) - The Few Leading the Many: Foreign Affiliates and Business Cycle Comovement
• Yanping Liu (PSU) – Capital Adjustment Costs: Implications for Domestic and Export Sales Dynamics
• Fernando Leibovici (NYU) – Financial Development and International Trade
• Attakrit Leckcivilize (LSE) – The Impact of Supply Chain Disruptions: Evidence from the Japanese Tsunami
• Sarah Kroeger (BU) – The Contribution of Offshoring to the Convexification of the U.S. Wage Distribution
• James Key (PSU) – Priors and Posteriors: Implications for Exporters
• Leo Karasik (U Toronto) – The Role of Regional Portfolios in the Affiliate Location Decision of Multinational Firms
• Fadi Hassan (LSE) – The Price of Development
• John Feddersen (Oxford) – Pollution Havens: Does Third Country Environmental Policy Matter?
• Benjamin Faber (LSE) – Trade Liberalization, the Price of Quality, and Inequality: Evidence from Mexican Store Prices
• Javier Cravino (UCLA) – Exchange Rates, Aggregate Productivity and the Currency of Invoicing of International Trade
• Bo-Young Choi (UC Davis) – The Differential Effect of Trade Liberalization When Buyer Power is Present
• Samuel Bazzi (UCSD) – Wealth Heterogeneity, Income Shocks, and International Migration: Theory and Evidence from Indonesia
• Jose Asturias (Minnesota) – Endogenous Transportation Costs

What do market economies have to do with cities?

Well, obviously cities are economic entities. To survive, a city or a region has to make money; it has to export more than it imports, in dollar terms. Cities that decline are on the losing side of this equation. So if you care about cities, which I do, it leads you to think about how they function as economic entities.

Alex Marshall’s new book doesn’t mention exports in the context of cities, so I don’t have a way to follow up on the logic underlying this claim. But trade surpluses are not at the heart of urban growth in any urban economics literature I’ve read.

[HT: Aaron Brown]