Free trade in higher education?

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:

As the United States and other member countries of the World Trade Organization continue negotiations on a new global-trade agreement in Geneva, about two dozen groups representing American colleges are beseeching U.S. officials to avoid making concessions that would threaten the autonomy of higher-education institutions.

I don’t have a subscription, but I assume the objections raised are similar to those documented in this older Chronicle piece by the same author. Applying traditional trade ideas to the services industry is sometimes a bit difficult, but here you get an infant-industry-like argument:

He says he worries that countries struggling to build a
national higher-education system could see large numbers of
middle-class and affluent students enrolling in private
foreign colleges — including distance-learning institutions
— leaving poorer students behind in a decaying public
higher-education system that does not receive enough financial
support from its government. South Africa, which is trying to
educate more black students, is particularly concerned about
this, says Mr. Hayward.

And trade hypocrisy is always in style:

Joseph Duffey, senior vice president of Sylvan Learning
Systems, which is actively establishing educational programs
abroad, says the United States should not ask other countries
to liberalize their policies for granting visas to American
educators when the United States has restrictive visa
policies.

Also check out the description of a book titled The WTO and The University:

The theory of the commodification of higher education—that higher education is increasingly being treated as a commercial product—emerged from the data as an explanation for both the USTR’s decision to include higher education in a major trade agreement, as well as the widespread negative reaction of the higher education industry to free trade in higher education services. This research revealed that American higher education was initially unprepared for the challenges of addressing trade concerns, leaving the USTR to take its cues about higher education from an organization without representative input from the broad higher education community.

I’m not at all familiar with this issue, so I’d be interested in learning what the latest Chronicle article says about the subject. I expect that the debate over education, which is the United States’ sixth-largest export, will be just one of many contentious discussions as more and more services become tradable.

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]