WTO launches PTA database

Watch out McGill! The World Trade Organization just launched its own exhaustive database of preferential trade agreements, in force and under negotiation. Kudos to McGill for doing it first and naming its page the “Preferential Trade Agreements Database,” as the WTO just looks silly when listing  the Canada-Singapore and US-Oman deals as “regional trade agreements.”

Strengthening the WTO by stretching it much farther?

Aaditya Mattoo and Arvind Subramanian want to double-down on the world trading system:

[T]he current Doha agenda cannot adequately deal with all the challenges facing the trading system…

Is it realistic for the trading system to aim for a broad agenda that includes exchange rates, environment, state aid, and oil and agricultural markets? Ironically, a bigger agenda that addresses the new concerns would improve the prospects of success because there would be greater scope for give-and-take between the major trading countries. China will have to recognize that its exchange rate policies can provoke a protectionist reaction; the United States and the European Union will have to refrain from excessive recourse to contingent and environmental protectionism and to subsidies; and emerging-market countries such as India will have to appreciate that keeping markets open will require an effort on their part to lower their significant trade barriers…

[T]he importance of issues that Doha does not address is becoming glaringly evident. It is in this sense that the world must now look beyond Doha.

A "surge in protectionism"

The Wall Street Journal says that a surge in protectionism is threatening to exacerbate our global economic pain. The story’s elements should be familiar to those that follow international trade:

  • Lobbies for industries like steel and automobiles are pushing for protection.
  • Countries have some room to raise tariffs since bound rates exceed applied tariffs. [As Richard Baldwin stressed]
  • Industries’ demand for anti-dumping measures is rising. [As Joseph Francois warned]
  • The G20 has been ineffective: “When the group last met, in mid-November, it agreed to ‘refrain from raising new barriers’ to trade or investment over the following 12 months. But a few days later, India increased tariffs on steel, iron and soybeans.” [As Baldwin and Simon Evenett lamented]

That said, this is far from Smoot-Hawley.

Server change, possible service interruption

Hi,
Thanks for reading Trade Diversion. In a couple of hours, I am moving the blog to a new server and switching to WordPress, so there may be some hiccups on Tuesday. If you don’t see a new post in your RSS reader announcing a successful migration by sometime Wednesday, please check www.tradediversion.net in your browser for a status update or new RSS/XML feed.

A guide to the very basics of Dixit-Stiglitz (updated)

A new semester is starting, and new students are encountering Dixit-Stiglitz monopolistic competition for the first time. I’ve updated my introductory guide to its basics by adding the step-by-step derivation of the indirect utility function (and hence the expenditure function).

Feedback from users (or teachers) is appreciated.

My original explanation of the guide is here.

“The Use and Misuse of Regressions in Explaining Economic Growth”

Francisco Rodríguez has a skeptic’s brief on growth regressions, noting that endogeneity, proxy/measurement, and robustness problems abound. He’s also critical of linearity assumption.

Rodríguez suggests two avenues for potentially more fruitful investigation: growth diagnostics and non-parametric regression.

By volume, waste paper is one of America’s top exports

[C]ustomers in China had ordered wastepaper from Dryden’s company, but when it arrived, they declined it. Bales and bales of abandoned cardboard and newsprint were sitting at Chinese ports as prices — which were high from July until October — dropped precipitously.

American exports of recyclable material used by the Chinese to make boxes to ship exports to the US and Europe are declining steeply, says NPR.

HT: Sabrina.