Author Archives: jdingel

"Cultural assimilation, cultural diffusion and the origin of the wealth of nations"

Quamrul Ashraf & Oded Galor propose a cultural explanation for economic growth, but it’s not the usual story:

A thousand years ago, Asia was ahead. Why is Europe richer now? Asia was geographically less vulnerable to cultural diffusion and thus benefited from enhanced assimilation, lower cultural diversity and greater accumulation of society-specific human capital; this was an edge in the agricultural stage. Greater cultural rigidity, however, diminished the ability to adapt to a new technological paradigm, delaying their industrialisation.

Full Vox column.

Today’s trade blogosphere highlights

Alex Singleton: Peter Mandelson says EPA opponents are spreading misinformation and propaganda.

AFP: A movie (not a documentary) about the Battle in Seattle premiered in Toronto last weekend.

Iana Dreyer: The French president’s call for CAP reform is “typical Sarko style – more markets + more national preference or protection. What the final result will be is to be seen.”

Dani Rodrik: UBC’s Nathan Nunn finds that African countries that exported more slaves between 1400 and 1900 are worse off economically today. Slave procurement resulted in state collapse and ethnic fractionalization.

Today's trade blogosphere highlights

Alex Singleton: Peter Mandelson says EPA opponents are spreading misinformation and propaganda.

AFP: A movie (not a documentary) about the Battle in Seattle premiered in Toronto last weekend.

Iana Dreyer: The French president’s call for CAP reform is “typical Sarko style – more markets + more national preference or protection. What the final result will be is to be seen.”

Dani Rodrik: UBC’s Nathan Nunn finds that African countries that exported more slaves between 1400 and 1900 are worse off economically today. Slave procurement resulted in state collapse and ethnic fractionalization.

Today's trade blogosphere highlights

Alex Singleton: Peter Mandelson says EPA opponents are spreading misinformation and propaganda.

AFP: A movie (not a documentary) about the Battle in Seattle premiered in Toronto last weekend.

Iana Dreyer: The French president’s call for CAP reform is “typical Sarko style – more markets + more national preference or protection. What the final result will be is to be seen.”

Dani Rodrik: UBC’s Nathan Nunn finds that African countries that exported more slaves between 1400 and 1900 are worse off economically today. Slave procurement resulted in state collapse and ethnic fractionalization.

The trade paradox

Moisés Naím says there’s a free trade paradox: trade is booming while negotiations bust.

In many countries, free trade agreements are now politically radioactive, with imports routinely blamed for job losses, lower salaries, heightened inequality, and more recently, even poisoned toothpaste and deadly medicines. The domestic politics of trade reforms are inherently skewed against trade deals…

In 2006, the volume of global merchandise exports grew 15 percent, while the world economy grew roughly 4 percent. In 2007, the growth in world trade is again expected to outstrip the growth rate of the global economy… An unprecedented number of countries, rich and poor alike, are seeing their overall economic performance boosted by strong export growth…

So, what explains the paradox of gridlocked trade agreements and surging trade flows? The short answer is technology and politics. In the past quarter century, technological innovations—from the Internet to cargo containers—lowered the costs of trading. And, in the same period, an international political environment more tolerant of openness created opportunities to lower barriers to imports and exports. China, India, the former Soviet Union, and many other countries launched major reforms that deepened their integration into the world’s economy. In developing countries alone, import tariffs dropped from an average of around 30 percent in the 1980s to less than 10 percent today. Indeed, one of the surprises of the past 20 or so years is how much governments have lowered obstacles to trade—unilaterally. Between 1983 and 2003, 66 percent of tariff reductions in the world took place because governments decided it was in their own interests to lower their import duties, 25 percent as a result of agreements reached in multilateral trade negotiations, and 10 percent through regional trade agreements with neighboring countries…

As the volume of trade continues to grow, the need for clearer and more effective rules becomes more critical. In this century, the quality of what is traded will be as important as the need to lower tariffs was in the last… Moreover, a rules-based system accepted by a majority of nations can protect smaller countries and companies from the abusive practices of bigger nations or large conglomerates. The rule of law is always better than the law of the jungle, even in resolving trade conflicts.

[Hat tip: WaPo]

Multilateralising regionalism

Trade policy wonks are gathering in Geneva this week. Not for WTO negotiations, but for a conference on multilateralising regionalism. It launched yesterday morning and concludes Wednesday afternoon.

Multilateralising Regionalism is a two and a half day conference dedicated to exploring these issues, and in particular, the relationship between regionalism and the multilateral trading system. The first two days of the conference will explore how regional trade agreements might be tamed through a multilaterally based approach to redefining trade cooperation. The final half day will consist of a high-level discussion by policymakers and scholars of the issues teased out in the first part of the conference.

The conference papers don’t seem to be available online (UPDATE: The WTO has now uploaded them!), but they will be published by the WTO as a monograph. Pascal Lamy’s opening remarks:

One might well ask what yet another conference on this subject can add. My answer to this is that I believe this conference is asking a number of questions that have not previously been addressed, notwithstanding the proliferation of scholarly literature.

We are not really asking here why so many regional agreements have sprung up — that question has dominated many a debate, and many interesting explanations have been offered. Rather, this conference looks forward and asks questions about how policymakers, traders and businesses think about, and react to, the explosion of regionalism…

A key idea underlying this conference is that the tangle of overlapping trade agreements will increasingly generate an interest in multilateralizing regional arrangements, in expanding them — or in other words, collapsing them into larger entities that bring us much closer to a multilateral system of trade arrangements. The question, then, is what forces and interests might push trade relations in a multilateralizing direction.

I covered Richard Baldwin’s paper on multilateralising regionalism back in July 2006.

UPDATE: The papers are available online now. That’s a lot of reading to do this weekend!

Economics of the Doha round

A special issue of the Pacific Economic Review features papers from a conference titled The Economics of the Doha Round and the WTO, held at the University of Hong Kong on 16–17 December 2005, in parallel with the Sixth WTO Ministerial Meeting in Hong Kong, with appearances by Robert Baldwin, Bernard Hoekman, Kym Anderson, Will Martin, Michael O. More, and others.