Every once in a while, President Bush shows some promise. He’s opposing the farm bill:
“At a time of record farm income, Congress decided to further increase subsidy rates, qualify more people for taxpayer support and move programs toward more government control,” Schafer told reporters today. “The president will veto this bill.”
American farmers are suffering from rising food prices?!?!
“Rural America is struggling in the face of skyrocketing energy prices, an economic downturn and rising food prices,” Clinton said. “Saying no to the farm bill would be saying no to rural America.”
Hillary is making good on her promise to not “put [her] lot in with economists.”
HT: H&R
WSJ:
A proposal to sweeten government support for American sugar producers is emerging as a major sticking point between Congress and the White House in final negotiations on the farm bill.
The initiative is a priority for House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson, a Democrat whose rural Minnesota district is among the nation’s top producers of sugar beets.
Rep. Peterson is pushing a package of proposals that would bolster the industry, including a plan to commit imported sugar to ethanol production, rather than having it sold into the consumer market, where it would compete with U.S. producers.
Emmanuel tells us who popularized the word “globalization.”
Emmanuel tells us who popularized the word “globalization.”
An OPEC in rice!? The prime minister of Thailand proposes a cartel.
Ivan Cherkashin, Svetlana Demidova, Susumu Imai, and Kala Krishna got their hands on the 3,032 submissions sent to the Journal of International Economics between 1995 and 2004. The product is a NBER working paper on how the journal operates.
We learn that the acceptance rate is around twenty percent, but falling fast. And non-native English speakers have more difficulty publishing. These interesting tidbits are scattered throughout the paper.
An obvious trend is the decrease in the share of submissions from the authors affiliated with the US universities from 50% in 1995 to 37% in 2004 and a corresponding increase in such number for researchers from the European universities from 12% to 28%, suggesting that at least in International Economics, the US may well be losing ground.
I should note that the bottom line is that the JIE does a pretty good job.
Dean Baker says tax incentives like the Patriot Employer Act can’t stem offshoring:
My reason for saying that the tax code is largely irrelevant to firms’ decisions to move jobs overseas is that any tax preferences tend to be a very small factor in location decisions. Firms ship jobs overseas because they can pay workers $1 an hour, instead of $20 an hour in the U.S. They are some quirks here and there in the tax code that can provide frosting for firms that ship jobs overseas, but there are also quirks that encourage them to keep jobs here.
FT:
A method known as “zeroing” used by the US in anti-dumping investigations and reviews was slapped down on Wednesday by the top court of the World Trade Organisation.
In a case brought by Mexico against punitive US duties on imports of Mexican steel, the WTO’s appellate body ruled that zeroing was illegal in all types of anti-dumping action. It was the latest in a series of similar rulings against Washington.
The issue has set the US against the rest of the 151-strong WTO membership in the Doha global trade talks, where Washington is pushing for zeroing to be legitimised in changes to anti-dumping rules.
It has also sparked a debate over the role of the appellate body, which the US claims is making rather than interpreting WTO rules. Thus the dispute panel that first considered Mexico’s complaint argued that current rules did permit zeroing in some circumstances, flouting an earlier appeals ruling. The panel’s decision has now been struck down.
Washington on Tuesday responded angrily, accusing the appellate body of over-reach “by inventing new obligations” and of undermining the proper functioning of the dispute settlement system.
The Townshend Act forbade the [East India] Company frrom selling its goods directly to the colonists. Instead, the EIC had to auction merchandise to middlemen, who then shipped the caragoes to American wholeslaers, who finally sold to local shop owners. In May 1773, Parliament, at the request of the EIC, passed the Tea Act. It imposed no new taxes, but rather allowed the Company, for the first time, to import tea directly from Asia into America. The act cut the price of tea in half and was therefore a boon to colonial consumers.
The middlemen cut out by the act, local smugglers and tea merchants, were not as happy… In November 1773, the East Indiamen Dartmouth, Beaver, and Eleanor entered Boston Harbor with the fisrt loads of the EIC’s tea. The conspirators, probably led by Samuel Adams, were well prepared and highly disciplined: they cleaned the decks when they were finished and took no tea for personal use or later sale.
— William Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World
HT: EconTalk
Trade Diversion 