Schools of thought

People in the first group have names like Bono, Angelina Jolie, Bob Geldof, Bill Gates, John Edwards, and Jeffrey Sachs. People in the second group have names like Abhijit Banerjee, Tim Besley, Francesco Caselli, Esther Duflo, Lant Pritchett, and Mark Rosenzweig. Guess which point of view gets the bulk of media coverage and of public attention.

Dani Rodrik describes two schools of thought in development economics, and it’s not the hackneyed market vs. state or Sachs vs Easterly dichotomies.

"Colonialism all over again"

A fascinating CSM story on Chinese investment in Africa:

Brad Phillips, director of Persecution International, an aid group working in South Sudan, has seen the destruction firsthand. “The Chinese are equal partners with Khartoum when it comes to exploiting resources and locals here,” he says. “Their only interest here is their own.” He would love to see the Chinese sponsor a school here, he says, or a clinic, or an agricultural program, or “anything for the people.” But there is nothing like that in sight. Just miles of desolate land.

“The Chinese simply do not care about us,” says Martin Buywomo, Paloich’s mayor. “They have no contact. They never even came to my tent to pay respects. They think we are lesser people.” A member of the Shilluk tribe who attended British mission schools, Mr. Buywomo puts down the worn copy of George Eliot’s 19th-century classic “Silas Marner” he is reading and continues sadly. “We see them in their trucks but they overlook us. If they saw us dying on the road, they would overlook us.”

Buywomo rearranges the Chinese-made plastic pink flowers on his desk. “This is colonialism all over again.”

I doubt that US investors like Chevron built many schools or clinics, but accusations of “scorched-earth clearances of the indigenous population” don’t sound good for China’s National Petroleum Corporation. Read the full story.

[HT: Drezner]

“Colonialism all over again”

A fascinating CSM story on Chinese investment in Africa:

Brad Phillips, director of Persecution International, an aid group working in South Sudan, has seen the destruction firsthand. “The Chinese are equal partners with Khartoum when it comes to exploiting resources and locals here,” he says. “Their only interest here is their own.” He would love to see the Chinese sponsor a school here, he says, or a clinic, or an agricultural program, or “anything for the people.” But there is nothing like that in sight. Just miles of desolate land.

“The Chinese simply do not care about us,” says Martin Buywomo, Paloich’s mayor. “They have no contact. They never even came to my tent to pay respects. They think we are lesser people.” A member of the Shilluk tribe who attended British mission schools, Mr. Buywomo puts down the worn copy of George Eliot’s 19th-century classic “Silas Marner” he is reading and continues sadly. “We see them in their trucks but they overlook us. If they saw us dying on the road, they would overlook us.”

Buywomo rearranges the Chinese-made plastic pink flowers on his desk. “This is colonialism all over again.”

I doubt that US investors like Chevron built many schools or clinics, but accusations of “scorched-earth clearances of the indigenous population” don’t sound good for China’s National Petroleum Corporation. Read the full story.

[HT: Drezner]

Keeping China in perspective

The US global trade deficit topped $800billion last year. Even so, the share of this deficit accounted for by East Asia, including China, in the 10 years to 2006 dropped significantly, from 70 per cent to 46 per cent. Meanwhile, the US trade deficit with the rest of the world has ballooned. Over the past decade, it grew by $244billion with East Asia but by $391billion with the rest of the world. Although China needs to apply fairer trading and currency policies, it is being blamed by US lawmakers, unions and manufacturers for some problems that it did not cause and cannot fix.

Michael Richardson also warns that a US-China trade war would cause significant collateral damage to many countries in the Asia-Pacific.

UPDATE: And to keep those numbers in perspective, see Steve Waldman in the comments section. Oil prices are a crucial element of the story.

What has freed trade?

Peter Gallagher thinks that unilateral reforms, not multilateral negotiations, deserve credit for our relatively liberal international economic order:

After thirty years of these stand-offs (Tokyo Round through Doha) it is past time to acknowledge that the multilateral trade round format doesn’t work. We cannot coordinate real changes in trade and investment policies by negotiation. Over and over again it appears that real changes arise only from autonomous measures such as those in Brazil and China in the late 80s and first half of the 90s; the EC (‘McSharry reforms’) in the first half of the 1990s; Vietnam’s and India’s first steps to liberalization in the mid-to-late 90s, and also reluctantly; ASEAN, Korea and Mexico in the late 90s. Attempts to wrench such changes from WTO Members in a round of negotiations has a very poor record of success and what changes are won come at a cost to the system.

More Doha dissection

Picking up on my use of medical metaphors to describe Doha last week, Simon Evenett describes the patient’s worsening condition:

India’s trade minister said the Doha Round was in intensive care last year; if that was the case then, now it appears to be in terminal decline…

The blame for this Round’s debacle lies squarely on the shoulders of WTO member governments, Mr. Lamy and the WTO secretariat should not be sacrificial lambs…

In past WTO negotiations, countries exchanged cuts in their bound rates. Since bound and applied rates were about the same thing, exporters in all nations had something to gain from pushing their governments to sign the deal. But now with so much unilateral reform, the proposals for bound rate cuts attract little support from exporters. Rich country exporters can ask: Why lobby for finishing Doha when you have already got the increased export opportunities for free?…

Indeed, while so many have been worrying about how the spread of regionalism and bilateralism in recent years has undermined the multilateral trading system, in fact many of the termites eating away at the Doha Round are associated with unilateral trade reform…

The Doha round is now almost dead. All that remains is for someone to discreetly turn the life support machine off.

If the Doha round’s collapse is seen as a loss for free traders, they may be victims of their own success.