Author Archives: jdingel

“Miserly progress made on Doha trade talks”

Alan Beattie has a long(ish) summary of the Doha round’s dim prospects in the FT. It begins: “If Charles Dickens wanted a bleak setting for a rewrite of A Christmas Carol, his classic tale of regret and redemption, he could do worse than the World Trade Organisation.”

Here’s a tidbit that caught my eye:

Bernard Hoekman, director of the World Bank’s international trade department, told a seminar in Washington last week that the bank and others had overhyped the round. When it came to sharing blame, he said, “I can point to myself and my organisation.” The bank produced ambitious estimates of how Doha could boost economic growth and reduce poverty. “Those became a focal point for expectations, and expectations were overblown.”

A decade of Doha

Some highlights from this evening’s discussion of the Doha negotiations at Columbia University:

  • On why it’s called the DDA: “I was facing down a half-dozen trade ministers who said, ‘I stood in my parliament and said there’d be no new trade round.’ So I said, ‘it’s not a trade round; it’s a development agenda’. [:::pffffffttt:::] It’s the sort of thing that doesn’t show up in many textbooks that gets the process going.” – Mike Moore
  • On Doha’s prospects: “I must say, I have never heard Pascal Lamy more grim than this evening.” – Merit Janow
  • “If Doha goes, no one is ever going have a multilateral round again.” – Jagdish Bhagwati

[My transcriptions are closer to quotations than paraphrasing, but these are not verbatim.]

Also on Doha, don’t miss this Alan Beattie tweet.

One way to increase access to the US labor market

Tim Lee, writing for Ars Technica, describes a Silicon Valley startup aiming to facilitate the creation of more Silicon Valley startups by improving labor mobility:

Blueseed plans to buy a ship and turn it into a floating incubator anchored in international waters off the coast of California…

Immigration law makes it difficult for many would-be immigrants to get permission to work in the United States. For example, there’s an annual cap on the number of H1-B visas available for American employers to hire skilled immigrant workers. However, permission to travel to the United States for business or tourism is much easier to get.

Marty pointed to the B-1 business visa as a key part of his company’s strategy. With a B-1 visa, visitors can freely travel to the United States for meetings, conferences, and even training seminars. B-1 visas are relatively easy to get, and can be valid for as long as 10 years.
Blueseed plans to provide regular ferry service between the ship to the United States. While Blueseed residents would need to do their actual work—such as writing code—on the ship, Marty envisions them making regular trips to Silicon Valley to meet with clients, investors, and business partners…

Blueseed’s business model seems like a long shot. Buying, outfitting, staffing, and filling a 1,000-person ship seems like a tall order for even the most talented three-person team.

Trade job-market papers (2011-12)

There are plenty of trade economists on the job market this year. I’ve pulled together an incomplete list of JMPs, like last year. As usual, I focus on trade papers, thereby neglecting international finance and open-economy macro papers and trade economists working in other fields (such as urban). Please add more in the comments.

The latest NBER trade research

Plenty of trade-related material in this morning’s NBER email:

Does “Buy American” boost US manufacturing employment?

A new Chicago Booth website polls expert economists on public policy issues. It recently asked people to strongly agree, agree, disagree, or strongly disagree with the following statement:

Federal mandates that government purchases should be “buy American” unless there are exceptional circumstances, such as in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, have a significant positive impact on U.S. manufacturing employment.

Here are two responses that caught my eye:

Participant Vote Confidence Comment
Daron Acemoglu Agree 6
4 years ago I would have disagreed. Recent evidence (Autor Dorn Hanson) suggests yes.Caveat: costs from higher prices & other inefficiencies
-see background information here
David Autor Disagree 4
Hard to believe this does much at all. But I’m speaking based on my prior. I’ve not seen any rigorous analysis.

The aggregate outcomes were:

IGM Buy American poll

When trade raises welfare and lowers measured GDP

This nifty note by Bajona, Gibson, Kehoe, and Ruhl points out that there may be little connection between real GDP and welfare; in fact, welfare-improving trade liberalization may lower measured real GDP. Here’s a simple example in the Heckscher-Ohlin setting:

The intuition behind the decrease in measured real GDP for the autarky to free trade scenario is simple: given factor endowments, the base-year production pattern in country i is the optimal production pattern for country i at the base year prices among all feasible production plans… Any deviation from that production pattern will lower the value of production at those prices.

WTO: WTR 2012 discussion forum

The WTO’s World Trade Report 2012 will focus on non-tariff barriers. Of course, NTBs are nothing new, but they’re more relevant in a low-tariff world. Their relative opaqueness makes them more difficult to negotiate, discipline, and study. The WTO invites submissions of short articles for their discussion forum, though I have no idea about the scope for influencing the report (due out in July).

The global trade surplus

The Economist on Exports to Mars: “The world exported $331 billion more than it imported in 2010, according to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook… Either the current-account deficits of countries such as America are being understated or the surpluses of countries like China are being overstated, and by a rising amount… Indeed, the global “surplus” now exceeds China’s.”