Did nineteenth century free traders hurt themselves by including intellectual property rights on their agenda? Does the WTO’s TRIPs provision risk repeating their error in the twenty-first century?

Why is intellectual property trade-related? In any case, should it be? The reassessment has been undertaken by advocates as well as skeptics of globalization…

The perceived connections between trade and one particular form of intellectual property—copyright—is especially worthy of historical scrutiny… International copyright was kept at bay in the United States until 1891… My premise is that the political and doctrinal allegiances of authors of arguments on both sides of the international copyright controversy matter because they reflect how, in the nineteenth century, intellectual property was “trade related.” Those who were at the vanguard of the movement for international copyright were also the leading advocates of free trade… Likewise, the principal articulators of the case against international copyright were also the foremost advocates of protection…

Free traders failed repeatedly for sixty years after the end of the Civil War to reduce the average tariff to its immediate prewar level. They failed despite making a case that, by comparison with the one made for free trade today, was compelling. Specifically, the principles of free labor engendered an antimonopoly argument for trade. Free trade, its advocates argued, would eliminate the special privileges granted to producers in specific industries, most notably cotton goods, iron, and steel. It would promote competition, lower prices, and raise consumers’ real incomes…

Carey attempted to turn the tables on the free traders: he argued that free trade promoted monopoly, and protection mitigated it. His conviction was sincere—but that particular part of his argument was unpersuasive, and relatively few of his followers bothered to repeat it. He was much more persuasive in arguing that international copyright promoted monopoly. In the face of the latter argument, the proponents of free trade and international copyright were put on the defensive…

One wonders whether the tireless advocacy of international copyright by free traders like Bryant—who framed the cause as one inextricably related to free trade—hindered the advancement of their principal cause. The long-awaited sweeping tariff reductions were deferred until 1913. Might the wait have been shorter if the antimonopoly credentials of the free-trade advocates had not been called into question?

That’s from Stephen Meardon, “How TRIPs Got Legs,” History of Political Economy, 2005. (Ungated 2004 working paper)

Read the full article for details of the arguments and some fascinating tidbits such as early 1800s free-trade poetry (so popular in Boston that they published a second edition!).

Did nineteenth century free traders hurt themselves by including intellectual property rights on their agenda? Does the WTO’s TRIPs provision risk repeating their error in the twenty-first century?

Why is intellectual property trade-related? In any case, should it be? The reassessment has been undertaken by advocates as well as skeptics of globalization…

The perceived connections between trade and one particular form of intellectual property—copyright—is especially worthy of historical scrutiny… International copyright was kept at bay in the United States until 1891… My premise is that the political and doctrinal allegiances of authors of arguments on both sides of the international copyright controversy matter because they reflect how, in the nineteenth century, intellectual property was “trade related.” Those who were at the vanguard of the movement for international copyright were also the leading advocates of free trade… Likewise, the principal articulators of the case against international copyright were also the foremost advocates of protection…

Free traders failed repeatedly for sixty years after the end of the Civil War to reduce the average tariff to its immediate prewar level. They failed despite making a case that, by comparison with the one made for free trade today, was compelling. Specifically, the principles of free labor engendered an antimonopoly argument for trade. Free trade, its advocates argued, would eliminate the special privileges granted to producers in specific industries, most notably cotton goods, iron, and steel. It would promote competition, lower prices, and raise consumers’ real incomes…

Carey attempted to turn the tables on the free traders: he argued that free trade promoted monopoly, and protection mitigated it. His conviction was sincere—but that particular part of his argument was unpersuasive, and relatively few of his followers bothered to repeat it. He was much more persuasive in arguing that international copyright promoted monopoly. In the face of the latter argument, the proponents of free trade and international copyright were put on the defensive…

One wonders whether the tireless advocacy of international copyright by free traders like Bryant—who framed the cause as one inextricably related to free trade—hindered the advancement of their principal cause. The long-awaited sweeping tariff reductions were deferred until 1913. Might the wait have been shorter if the antimonopoly credentials of the free-trade advocates had not been called into question?

That’s from Stephen Meardon, “How TRIPs Got Legs,” History of Political Economy, 2005. (Ungated 2004 working paper)

Read the full article for details of the arguments and some fascinating tidbits such as early 1800s free-trade poetry (so popular in Boston that they published a second edition!).

Matilde Bombardini’s “Firm Heterogeneity and Lobby Participation” is forthcoming in the JIE.

This paper builds a model where individual firms determine the amount of resources to allocate to political contributions and shows that, in the presence of a fixed cost of channeling political contributions, it is efficient for a lobby to be formed by the largest firms in a sector. Therefore the size distribution of firms plays an important role: sectors with a higher share of firms above a given size exhibit higher intensity of political activity. This prediction is borne out by the data: industries characterized by higher firm size dispersion obtain a higher level of protection.

I have not had time to read recent papers by Paul Krugman and Robert Lawrence, but I won’t be surprised if this bottom line from the Economist is right:

Given the lack of fine-grained statistics, none of these studies settles the debate. It is possible that globalisation is becoming a bigger cause of American wage inequality. But contrary to the tone of the political debate, and the thrust of Mr Krugman’s commentary, the evidence is inconclusive. “How can we quantify the actual effect of rising trade on wages?” Mr Krugman asked at the end of his paper. “The answer, given the current state of the data, is that we can’t.”

Oxford’s Paul Collier writes about the food crisis in the Times:

The best solution to the rise in food prices is not to arrest globalisation. China’s long march to prosperity is something to celebrate. The remedy to high food prices is to increase supply. The most realistic way is to replicate the Brazilian model of large, technologically sophisticated agro-companies that supply the world market. There are still many areas of the world – including large swaths of Africa – that have good land that could be used far more productively if it were properly managed by large companies. To contain the rise in food prices we need more, globalisation not less…

Unfortunately, trade in agricultural produce has been the main economic activity to have resisted the force of globalisation. The cost of this is now being picked up by the poorest people in the world.

Read the full piece, which comments on the role of biofuel subsidies, resistance to GM crops, and current price controls in exacerbating the crisis.

Oxford’s Paul Collier writes about the food crisis in the Times:

The best solution to the rise in food prices is not to arrest globalisation. China’s long march to prosperity is something to celebrate. The remedy to high food prices is to increase supply. The most realistic way is to replicate the Brazilian model of large, technologically sophisticated agro-companies that supply the world market. There are still many areas of the world – including large swaths of Africa – that have good land that could be used far more productively if it were properly managed by large companies. To contain the rise in food prices we need more, globalisation not less…

Unfortunately, trade in agricultural produce has been the main economic activity to have resisted the force of globalisation. The cost of this is now being picked up by the poorest people in the world.

Read the full piece, which comments on the role of biofuel subsidies, resistance to GM crops, and current price controls in exacerbating the crisis.

Oxford’s Paul Collier writes about the food crisis in the Times:

The best solution to the rise in food prices is not to arrest globalisation. China’s long march to prosperity is something to celebrate. The remedy to high food prices is to increase supply. The most realistic way is to replicate the Brazilian model of large, technologically sophisticated agro-companies that supply the world market. There are still many areas of the world – including large swaths of Africa – that have good land that could be used far more productively if it were properly managed by large companies. To contain the rise in food prices we need more, globalisation not less…

Unfortunately, trade in agricultural produce has been the main economic activity to have resisted the force of globalisation. The cost of this is now being picked up by the poorest people in the world.

Read the full piece, which comments on the role of biofuel subsidies, resistance to GM crops, and current price controls in exacerbating the crisis.

There are a few upsides to the ‘food crisis.’ Chris Blattman highlights one:

The rural poor are often the principal concern of anti-poverty programs, and many produce the very foods that are rising in price. That means the historically poor are getting wealthier. Not a peep from them? Well, finding them requires leaving the comfy capital and makes a less compelling news leader. But they could at least bury the observation on page A19. Alas, no.

The rise in food prices is creating a transfer of wealth from net consumers to net producers. Net consumers tend to live in urban slums. Net producers tend to live in mud shacks hundreds of miles from the capital.

Rising agricultural prices are eliciting interventionist reactions:

Vietnam’s government announced here on Friday that it would cut rice exports by nearly a quarter this year. The government hoped that keeping more rice inside the country would hold down prices.

The same day, India effectively banned the export of all but the most expensive grades of rice. Egypt announced on Thursday that it would impose a six-month ban on rice exports, starting April 1, and on Wednesday, Cambodia banned all rice exports except by government agencies…

Rice is unusual among major agricultural commodities in that most of the major rice-consuming countries are self-sufficient or nearly so. Only 7 percent of the world’s rice production is traded across international borders each year, according to figures from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome…

Vietnam, Egypt and India all limited rice exports last year, but the limits were much less drastic and were imposed much later in the year, after much more rice had been shipped.

Meanwhile, states secretly move to secure supplies:

Governments are racing to strike secretive barter and bilateral agreements with food-exporting countries to secure scarce supplies as the price of agricultural commodities jump to record highs, diplomats and cereal traders say.

The moves coincide with a significant tightening of the global food market as leading exporters of agricultural commodities ban foreign sales. The government-to-government contracts could bypass those restrictions, diplomats say.

Dan Drezner writes :

Go back to NAFTA. Kevin is right to point out that the agreement’s efonomic effects were not terribly large. On the other hand, even skeptics of trade liberalization — Dani Ro[d]rik, Paul Krugman, and Joseph Stiglitz — supported NAFTA because it locked Mexican economic reforms, promoted political reforms, and cemented a stronger bilateral relaionship.

What? Paul Krugman was a trade skeptic in 1994? And did Joe Stiglitz voice an opinion on NAFTA at the time?

Krugman: Not an ounce of economic skepticism in pieces like this one from November 1993.

Stiglitz: When did he talk about NAFTA before 1999?