Freight shipping capacity constraints

The NY Times has a story on shipping costs:

Fighting for freight, retailers are outbidding each other to score scarce cargo space on ships, paying two to three times last year’s freight rates — in some cases, the highest rates in five years. And still, many are getting merchandise weeks late.

The problems stem from 2009, when stores slashed inventory. With little demand for shipping, ocean carriers took ships out of service: more than 11 percent of the global shipping fleet was idle in spring 2009, according to AXS-Alphaliner, an industry consultant.

Carriers also moved to “slow steaming,” traveling at slower and more fuel-efficient speeds, while the companies producing containers, the typically 20- or 40-foot boxes in which most consumer companies ship goods, essentially stopped making them.

With freight rates that high, why isn’t the idle portion of the fleet coming back into service?

The shipping companies slowly added ships back into the system early this year, but they did so haltingly, not wanting to add too much supply and risk having their rates fall. (Major carriers largely hew to the rates set by carrier groups, which are allowed to discuss and set voluntary rates, under antitrust immunity.)…

Because of slow steaming, which takes containers out of the system for a longer period of time, and because places like Russia and India began to demand container space, finding something to ship goods in, much less space on a ship, has been problematic.

“There aren’t enough actual containers, so therefore, even if the vessel capacity situation is easing up a little bit,” said Peter Tirschwell, senior vice president for strategy at The Journal of Commerce, “you now have equipment that people can’t get.”

[HT: Seb]

Trade-induced learning

The review of trade-induced learning on pages F324 to F332 of this new article by Ronald Mendoza seems like a pretty good introduction to the topic. He covers the empirical literature on firm-level productivity (selection vs learning by exporting), the roles of quality and variety in importing and exporting, the importance of export destinations’ characteristics, and the product space. As with any survey, you’ll have to turn to the underlying papers to get into the methodological issues and strategies.

[HT: Jim]

Against ACTA

This statement reflects the conclusions reached at a meeting of over 90 academics, practitioners and public interest organizations from six continents gathered at American University Washington College of Law, June 16-18, 2010. The meeting, convened by American University’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, was called to analyze the official text of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), released for the first time in April, 2010. Negotiating parties released the text only after public criticism of the unusually closed process and widespread disquiet over the negotiations’ presumed substance. (See Wellington Declaration, EU Resolution on Transparency and State of Play of the ACTA Negotiations).
We find that the terms of the publicly released draft of ACTA threaten numerous public interests, including every concern specifically disclaimed by negotiators.
• Negotiators claim ACTA will not interfere with citizens’ fundamental rights and liberties; it will.
• They claim ACTA is consistent with the WTO Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS); it is not.
• They claim ACTA will not increase border searches or interfere with cross-border transit of legitimate generic medicines; it will.
• And they claim that ACTA does not require “graduated response” disconnections of people from the internet; however, the agreement strongly encourages such policies.
ACTA is the predictably deficient product of a deeply flawed process. What started as a relatively simple proposal to coordinate customs enforcement has transformed into a sweeping and complex new international intellectual property and internet regulation with grave consequences for the global economy and governments’ ability to promote and protect the public interest.

This statement reflects the conclusions reached at a meeting of over 90 academics, practitioners and public interest organizations from six continents gathered at American University Washington College of Law, June 16-18, 2010. The meeting, convened by American University’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, was called to analyze the official text of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), released for the first time in April, 2010. Negotiating parties released the text only after public criticism of the unusually closed process and widespread disquiet over the negotiations’ presumed substance. (See Wellington Declaration, EU Resolution on Transparency and State of Play of the ACTA Negotiations).

We find that the terms of the publicly released draft of ACTA threaten numerous public interests, including every concern specifically disclaimed by negotiators.

• Negotiators claim ACTA will not interfere with citizens’ fundamental rights and liberties; it will.

• They claim ACTA is consistent with the WTO Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS); it is not.

• They claim ACTA will not increase border searches or interfere with cross-border transit of legitimate generic medicines; it will.

• And they claim that ACTA does not require “graduated response” disconnections of people from the internet; however, the agreement strongly encourages such policies.

ACTA is the predictably deficient product of a deeply flawed process. What started as a relatively simple proposal to coordinate customs enforcement has transformed into a sweeping and complex new international intellectual property and internet regulation with grave consequences for the global economy and governments’ ability to promote and protect the public interest.

Hat tip to Larry.

p.s. I haven’t seen any defenses of ACTA. Is this issue as one-sided as it seems? Please provide links/papers in the comments if you know of any.

"Figuring Out the Doha Round"

Gary Hufbauer, Jeff Schott, and Woan Foong Wong launched a book titled Figuring Out the Doha Round yesterday. They argue that the US, EU, and China should accelerate and expand (“top up”) their Doha offers, particularly in services liberalization, because the current offers on the table are insufficient to garner support from the major players.

Here are their slides. The authors argue that the WTO’s credibility as a negotiating forum is important to the credibility of its dispute settlement mechanism, but the logic of that argument isn’t immediately clear to me.

“Figuring Out the Doha Round”

Gary Hufbauer, Jeff Schott, and Woan Foong Wong launched a book titled Figuring Out the Doha Round yesterday. They argue that the US, EU, and China should accelerate and expand (“top up”) their Doha offers, particularly in services liberalization, because the current offers on the table are insufficient to garner support from the major players.

Here are their slides. The authors argue that the WTO’s credibility as a negotiating forum is important to the credibility of its dispute settlement mechanism, but the logic of that argument isn’t immediately clear to me.

Simonovska & Waugh: "The Elasticity of Trade: Estimates and Evidence"

Is the elasticity of trade significantly lower than suggested by prior estimates?

Quantitative results from a large class of structural gravity models of international trade depend critically on a single parameter governing the elasticity of trade with respect to trade frictions. We provide a new method to estimate this elasticity and illustrate the merits of our approach relative to the estimation strategy of Eaton and Kortum (2002). We employ this method on data for 123 developed and developing countries for the year 2004 using new disaggregate price and trade flow data. Our benchmark estimate for all countries is approximately 4.5, nearly 50 percent lower than the alternative estimation strategy would suggest. This difference implies a doubling of the measured welfare costs of autarky across a large class of widely used trade models.