US Treasury delays April 15 currency manipulation report

Geithner:

I have decided to delay publication of the report to Congress on the international economic and exchange rate policies of our major trading partners due on April 15.  There are a series of very important high-level meetings over the next three months that will be critical to bringing about policies that will help create a stronger, more sustainable, and more balanced global economy.  Those meetings include a G-20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors meeting in Washington later this month, the Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED) with China in May, and the G-20 Finance Ministers and Leaders meetings in June. I believe these meetings are the best avenue for advancing U.S. interests at this time.

Via Emmanuel.

Today at Vox

There are two columns on important, big-picture topics at VoxEU today.

Martin Ravallion: The World Bank’s estimate of China’s real GDP per capita was revised down by 40% in 2005. This column explains how price surveys led to dramatically different estimates once they considered the effect of economic growth. It argues that while large revisions were needed, they could have been avoided with better economic models to measure PPPs.

Yiping Huang: Should the US follow Paul Krugman’s advice and use protectionist policies against China’s exports to encourage a revaluation of its currency? This column argues against this idea. Far from saving jobs, a revaluation of the Chinese currency might even cut global economic growth by 1.5%.

Against the “startup visa”

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry:

About a year ago, Paul Graham of Y Combinator put out an idea for a Startup Visa that would allow foreign entrepreneurs to set up in the United States if they could raise enough money from institutional investors such as renowned business angels and VC firms…

Pretty much all the digerati are in love with the idea and believe it will finally allow immigrants to start companies in the US…

For one, getting the visa depends too much on investors. Investors already have too much power in the investor-entrepreneur relationship. If this act is passed, fundraising won’t just affect an entrepreneur’s company, but his or her life. You have to raise that round, or you’ll get deported!…

Another big problem with the Startup Visa Act is that it increases, rather than decreases, risk for the entrepreneurs. Launching a startup by definition means taking on a lot of risk: financial, reputational, you name it. The Startup Visa would increase risk for the entrepreneur by making the stakes so much bigger, by making literally everything depend on success — and not business success, but success how Congress defines it.

Via Tim Lee.

Censorship as a trade barrier

Gilbert Kaplan says that if Chinese censorship forces out US content companies like Google, the US should retaliate by erecting trade barriers to Chinese computer hardware exports. Nate Anderson at Ars Technica reports:

Dealing with censorship as a trade violation isn’t a new idea. Computer industry lobbying group CCIA was talking up trade complaints as a way to handle Chinese censorship back in January. CEO Ed Black said at the time, “It is increasingly apparent that censorship is a barrier to trade, and that China cannot limit the free flow of information and still comply with its international trade obligations. The Chinese government has said it is gathering more information before deciding how to proceed and we would urge that they look at the issue holistically with government, economic and trade officials involved in the decision.”

Of course, lobbyists aren’t the best source to describe trade law. I’d prefer to consult the folks at IELP, for example.

Banning the consumption of tradable goods and services isn’t a WTO violation per se; international trade law emphasizes non-discrimination in the treatment of foreign and domestic products. Consider Antigua’s online gambling case against the US at the WTO. The basis for its claims was not that the US was obliged to allow online gambling, but that if it allowed domestic online gambling (such as allowed by the Interstate Horseracing Act), it was obliged by its GATS commitments to also allow online gambling provided by foreign suppliers. Similarly, I suspect that censorship only constitutes a trade barrier if foreign sources of information are censored more heavily than domestic providers, i.e. a difference in national treatment.

If China censors both domestic and foreign internet sites, then it is unlikely that its WTO commitments oblige it to liberalize both. Thus, the line of thinking from folks like Dan Drezner and Simon Lester (1, 2) is that WTO law isn’t much of a tool to wield against Chinese censorship.

ISO country codes for USITC DataWeb output

The US International Trade Commission’s Interactive Tariff and Trade DataWeb provides detailed data describing aggregate trade flows between the United States and other economies. It reports country names without reporting a country code. Many data sources (e.g. the IMF’s World Economic Outlook database) report both a country name and a standardized ISO three-letter country code. Due to the use of unofficial names (Burma vs Myanmar, East Timor vs Timor-Leste, etc) and incon- sistent formatting (“Grenada Island” vs “Grenada”, “Saint” vs “St” vs “St.”, etc), merging using country names rather than standardized country codes is unreliable.
I’m making available a correspondence between USITC DataWeb country names and ISO country codes that I built in the course of my research. You can download it as a tab-delimited text file and a Stata data file from my website. The (very brief) documentation is here.

The US International Trade Commission’s Interactive Tariff and Trade DataWeb provides detailed data describing aggregate trade flows between the United States and other economies. It reports country names without reporting a country code. Many data sources (e.g. the IMF’s World Economic Outlook database) report both a country name and a standardized ISO three-letter country code. Due to the use of unofficial names (Burma vs Myanmar, East Timor vs Timor-Leste, etc) and inconsistent formatting (“Grenada Island” vs “Grenada”, “Saint” vs “St” vs “St.”, etc), merging using country names rather than standardized country codes is unreliable.

I’m making available a correspondence between USITC DataWeb country names and ISO country codes that I built in the course of my research. You can download it as a tab-delimited text file and a Stata data file from my website. The (very brief) documentation is here.

What will we learn from Millennium Villages?

Michael Clemens on the Millennium Villages Project:

The only independent evaluation of the MVs is currently planned to proceed in three waves: baseline, year 3, and year 5 of the project. That is, the evaluation has no publicly-stated plan to proceed long past the end of the five-year intervention in each village, before deciding whether or not it would be right to vastly scale up the intervention all across Africa. A recent research paper starkly showed how inadequate such a stance can be.

That paper, by Shaohua Chen, Ren Mu, and Martin Ravallion, is a lesson in humility (ungated version here, published here). It studies the Southwest Project in China, a village-level development package intervention executed in 1,800 rural villages in the late 1990s. Like the Millennium Village intervention it targeted the poorest villages, lasted about five years, and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per village. It sought to permanently reverse the fortunes of those villages with a broad-based package including roads, piped water, power lines, upgrading schools and clinics, training of teachers and health-care workers, microcredit, and initiatives for raising crop yields, animal husbandry, and horticulture.

Right before the end of the Southwest Project intervention, five years after it started, the project seemed to indeed be reversing the fortunes of the treated villages. Income in those villages grew by 20% more during the project than in similar villages in the same area that had not received the intervention, and savings grew by 100% more.

Then the intervention ended and—fast forward five years—all those effects on income and savings disappeared. Ten years after the five-year project began, average income and savings in the villages that got that massive package of interventions were indistinguishable from income and savings in villages that did not.

Notably, incomes in both the treated and untreated Chinese villages in the Southwest Project area increased greatly during the span of the project (1995-2000) and for years thereafter. The reason this happened is because the Chinese economy was being transformed during this period, not because of massive village-level package development interventions.

The point here is not that the Southwest Project was the same as the MVP; it wasn’t. The point is that short-term evaluation is plainly inadequate. It is obvious that the MVP is going to have short-term impacts. The size of the intervention is the same order of magnitude as the size of the entire economy of each village; that is, the MV intervention is roughly 100% of local income per capita (see the bottom of this post for this calculation). Indeed, it would be astonishing to not see short-term effects with an intervention that gargantuan. The three-year evaluation results that the MVP plans to release this year simply won’t tell us much.

The only interesting evaluation question is in the long term, for three reasons: 1) because unlike short-term impacts the answer is not obvious, 2) because long-term change is the stated goal of the MVP, and 3) because other village-level package interventions have shown that short-term effects and long-term effects can be completely different from one another.