APEC leaders are threatening to look at “options and prospects” for a FTAAP in order to pressure recalcitrant countries at the WTO’s Doha negotiations. They’ve got the right outcome at heart, but I don’t think the FTAAP is credible leverage.
Author Archives: jdingel
Who's afraid of the big bad APEC?
APEC leaders are threatening to look at “options and prospects” for a FTAAP in order to pressure recalcitrant countries at the WTO’s Doha negotiations. They’ve got the right outcome at heart, but I don’t think the FTAAP is credible leverage.
JEP – firms, trade, and trade costs
The latest issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives has some top notch trade economists discussing their research specialties.
This is going to produce a breakthrough in trade?
Should you be afraid of the jungle?
Ben Muse presents a pair of “scary campfire tales for economic policy analysts,” in which Joseph Francois and Brad DeLong lament the hostility of government bureaucrats and representatives to trade policy analysts. After reading those, you might reach for Simon Evenett’s “The trade policy jungle: a survival guide for academic economists” (pdf) in hopes of calming your fears.
Golan v. Gonzales: Uruguay round copyright provisions challenged
While the Doha negotiations are going nowhere fast, the Uruguay round might be moving backwards — its implementation is up in the air due to a court case decided this week. Orin Kerr reports:
Golan v. Gonzales, a fascinating Tenth Circuit case… went most of the way towards striking down section 514 of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act on First Amendment grounds. As I understand it, this section of the act restored the copyright of some foreign materials that had fallen into the public domain; it was passed to satisfy the U.S. treaty obligation to afford the same copyright protection to foreign authors as U.S. law provides to U.S. authors. Golan’s argument is that taking the materials out of the public domain violated the First Amendment.
I just learned of this case, and most of the bloggers covering it are lawyers, so I don’t know the implications for trade policy or how other countries might react.
Make Poverty History… very slowly
“The grievous truth is that although a range of public actions can and should help many people, most of the bottom billion will not — and cannot — be freed from poverty in our lifetimes.” – Michael Clemens
Immigrant poverty
“[I]t takes a special kind of brazenness to propose a reduction of the national poverty rate at the expense of ensuring that more people stay poor by denying them opportunity to set foot in the nation.” – The Economist on Heritage’s Robert Rector.
Is economic freedom “contagious”?
It’s already late evening, so I won’t have a chance to read the Cato Institute’s latest Economic Freedom of the World report until tomorrow evening. Here’s their blurb:
Economic freedom in one country can spread to another and when neighboring countries implement simultaneous reforms to encourage economic freedom the impact is broader…
Using spatial econometric models, the study’s authors [Russell S. Sobel and Peter T. Leeson] concluded that “while changes in the economic freedom in one country have only a modest impact on neighboring countries, when multiple neighbors experience simultaneous changes in economic freedom, the impact is much greater. Thus broad regional changes in freedom can and do have significant impacts on surrounding countries.”
My gut reaction to this claim is skepticism, but I don’t strongly hold that prior belief, as I’ve never thought about this topic before. I’ll have to check out their work and post an update later in the week.
Is economic freedom "contagious"?
It’s already late evening, so I won’t have a chance to read the Cato Institute’s latest Economic Freedom of the World report until tomorrow evening. Here’s their blurb:
Economic freedom in one country can spread to another and when neighboring countries implement simultaneous reforms to encourage economic freedom the impact is broader…
Using spatial econometric models, the study’s authors [Russell S. Sobel and Peter T. Leeson] concluded that “while changes in the economic freedom in one country have only a modest impact on neighboring countries, when multiple neighbors experience simultaneous changes in economic freedom, the impact is much greater. Thus broad regional changes in freedom can and do have significant impacts on surrounding countries.”
My gut reaction to this claim is skepticism, but I don’t strongly hold that prior belief, as I’ve never thought about this topic before. I’ll have to check out their work and post an update later in the week.
Trade Diversion 