The NBER’s fall trade meetings are this weekend in San Francisco. The agenda and three-quarters of the papers are online.

Financing trade
Antras & Foley: “Poultry in Motion: A Study of International Trade Finance Practices”
Chor & Manova: “Off the Cliff and Back? Credit Conditions and International Trade during the Global Financial Crisis”
Feenstra, Li & Yu: “Exports and Credit Constraints under Incomplete Information: Theory and Evidence from China”
Re-examining trade theory
Handbury & Weinstein: “Is New Economic Geography Right? Evidence from Price Data”
Markusen: “Putting Per-Capita Income Back into Trade Theory”
Firm and sector heterogeneity
Cosar, Guner & Tybout: “Firm Dynamics, Job Turnover and Wage Distributions in an Open Economy”
Simonovska & Waugh: “The Elasticity of Trade: Estimates and Evidence”
Harrigan & Schlychkov: “Export Prices of US Firms”

At Econbrowser, Willem Thorbecke argues that renminbi appreciation alone wouldn’t make much sense: “if policymakers are concerned about China’s surplus, they need to consider exchange rates throughout East Asia rather than the Chinese exchange rate alone.” The reason is the “Factory Asia” phenomenon. Check out the composition of China’s surplus:

Doug Irwin in the WSJ on the Great Depression, Smoot-Hawley, Ben Stein, the gold standard, and currency wars. Read the whole thing.

Unilateral trade liberalization is quite underdiscussed, perhaps for both institutional and political reasons. There is little reason for multilateral institutions like the WTO to discuss unilateral liberalization, since it is outside their purview and does little to hurt their missions, and policymakers pursuing trade agreements for political reasons have little interest in lowering their own trade barriers.

But unilateral liberalization is big. The World Bank attributes two-thirds of developing-country liberalization during 1983-2003 to unilateral actions.

In a recent working paper, Pierre-Louis Vezina analyses the case of East Asia, where he says countries unilaterally cut tariffs to attract Japanese FDI, as Japanese firms sought to establish affiliates that would process imported components.

Focusing my analysis on seven Asian emerging economies, and using tools from spatial econometrics, I show that tariffs on parts and components followed those of competing countries if the latter were lower, if FDI jealousy was high, and if competing countries were at a similar level of development, hence competing more intensively at the tariff level… I show that these results do not hold when using tariffs on finished products nor when estimating the model for countries that are not part of the sliced-up supply chain, such as Australia.

The one tome devoted to the topic that I know is Going Alone, edited by Jagdish Bhagwati.

I blogged previously that the EU might liberalize its MFN tariffs to assist Pakistan in the wake of its massive flooding. Now it looks that the tariffs cut will be temporary and discriminatory. The EU has pledged to adopt WTO-consistent measures, but it also promises “exclusively to Pakistan increased market access to the EU”. How it can do both is not clear.

Trade theory won another Nobel Prize this week… on The Simpsons. On Sunday’s season premiere, Jagdish Bhagwati picked up the prize, while the betting pool also included Avinash Dixit and Elhanan Helpman.

I suspect this is the first time that a trade theorist has appeared in prime-time cartoon form. It’s the opening scene:

http://www.hulu.com/embed/dun6KAqX7rnSIEzbaRb5QQ

You’ll have to wait until October 11 for the real thing.

The WTO Public Forum is this week, and they’re live-tweeting it.

Ryan Avent still believes what he believes about renminbi revaluation. Fred Bergsten still believes what he believes about it. But then he springs the suggestion of “countervailing currency intervention”, in which the US government would sell dollars and buy renminbi – check it out at 7:05 of the video.

Dani Rodrik says that Chinese undervaluation hurts growth prospects in other poor countries.

The US regions where people are most likely to google “Smoot-Hawley” are Washington DC and Michigan. [Google normalizes the data for total web traffic, so these are akin to “searches per internet user” measures for the regions.]

We’ll see if DC and Detroit buy the book most intensely too.

The US regions where people are most likely to google “Smoot-Hawley” are Washington DC and Michigan. [Google normalizes the data for total web traffic, so these are akin to “searches per internet user” measures for the regions.]

We’ll see if DC and Detroit buy the book most intensely too.

It’s international trade’s week at the NBER summer institute. The agenda and papers are available online.