No US-Malaysia FTA

Kyodo:

The United States has given up completing negotiations for a free trade agreement with Malaysia in time for submission under President George W. Bush fast-track negotiating authority expires, a spokesman for the U.S. Trade Representative said Friday.

Trade litigation

Can the WTO’s dispute settlement panel bear its increasing load of contentious cases?

Alan Beattie voices concern:

WTO panels comprise three from a roster of part-time panellists that includes trade officials, diplomats and academics. Some, oddly, are moonlighting from day jobs as national ambassadors to the WTO, meaning they are negotiating over trade deals one day and ruling on their meaning the next. They do not have to be lawyers, though there is a separate appellate body whose members must have legal expertise. Panels rely heavily on advice from the WTO’s small secretariat to interpret legal questions.

It is hard completely to dismiss the contention that law affecting thousands of businesses, millions of workers and billions of dollars is being determined by panels of part-time amateurs making it up as they go along.

Peter Gallagher is happier:

Governments are to blame for every one of the legal entanglements that Mr Beattie mentions… The WTO’s appellate body now interprets trade agreements in precisely the same way as every other treaty using standards of jurisprudence that citizens – even lawyers – everywhere demand in municipal courts. Governments that accept the WTO agreements must, as a consequence, now say what they mean and do as they say they will do. Is this a bad thing?

Public opinion favors regulatory standards in trade agreements

The result of polling people in seventeen countries:

Strong majorities in developing nations around the world support requiring countries that sign trade agreements to meet minimum labor and environmental standards, a multinational poll finds. Nine in 10 Americans also support such protections.

If domestic constituents support labor and environmental regulations, why do they need to be tied to trade agreements?

Possible answers:

(1) Domestic constituents favor legislating these standards independent of trade agreements, but the survey didn’t ask the question in that form. Poor country policy makers aren’t responsive to their constituents’ opinion on this issue, in trade talks or otherwise.

(2) The meaning of the phrase “minimum standards” differs across users. Poor country governments reject strict standards designed to protect rich country proponents, but they would favor standards better tailored to their circumstances.

(3) Developing country citizens feel that international commerce differs in important ways from domestic economic activity and therefore should be conducted under different rules.

Other hypotheses?

"Millennium Development Holes"

An editorial in Nature criticizes the Millennium Development Goals for projecting a “pseudoscientific” image:

Every year, the UN rolls out reports with slick graphics, seemingly noting with precise scientific precision progress towards the goals. But the reports mask the fact that the quality of most of the underlying data sets is far from adequate. Moreover, the indicators often combine very different types of data, making aggregation and analysis of the deficient data even more complicated.

There are decent data for just a handful of indicators, such as child mortality, but for most of the 163 developing countries, many indicators do not even have two data points for the period 1990–2006. And few developing countries have any data for around 1990, the baseline year. It is impossible to estimate progress for most of the indicators over less than five years, and sparse poverty data can only be reliably compared over decades. To pretend that progress towards the 2015 goals can be accurately and continually measured is false.

[Hat tip: Ruth Levine at CGD]

“Millennium Development Holes”

An editorial in Nature criticizes the Millennium Development Goals for projecting a “pseudoscientific” image:

Every year, the UN rolls out reports with slick graphics, seemingly noting with precise scientific precision progress towards the goals. But the reports mask the fact that the quality of most of the underlying data sets is far from adequate. Moreover, the indicators often combine very different types of data, making aggregation and analysis of the deficient data even more complicated.

There are decent data for just a handful of indicators, such as child mortality, but for most of the 163 developing countries, many indicators do not even have two data points for the period 1990–2006. And few developing countries have any data for around 1990, the baseline year. It is impossible to estimate progress for most of the indicators over less than five years, and sparse poverty data can only be reliably compared over decades. To pretend that progress towards the 2015 goals can be accurately and continually measured is false.

[Hat tip: Ruth Levine at CGD]

Underworld Economics

Raymond Baker & Jennifer Nordin on dirty money:

This enormous disappearance of capital from poor countries—perhaps a cumulative $5 trillion in recent years—should be of keen interest to economists. Billions of dollars in foreign aid have flowed into developing countries over the last several decades—on average $50 to $70 billion a year. These countries, home to 80 percent of the world’s population, often have weak le- gal and administrative structures, large gangs of drug dealers and racketeers, and wealthy elites who want their money elsewhere. The estimated $500 billion in illicit outflows eviscerates foreign aid and contributes to deeper poverty for billions of people. Despite the impact of trillions of dollars of dirty money flowing out of poorer countries, we are still at step one: measuring it.

International flows of dirty money also have implications for the (mis)measurement of trade volumes and balances.