Alan Beattie on the Doha Round Problem
Disciplinary boundaries matter, unfortunately. When an economist tries to sound insightful, the “insight” sounds banal to political scientists:
What do we learn from this? It’s not the global mechanisms that are wonky. It’s the weakness of the national governments pulling the levers. This would be as true of a plurilateral trade deal as of a multilateral, of course. There is no technocratic solution to the Doha round. It’s a political problem.
Trade and Culinary Adventures: EU, Canada and Seals
But Andree Garcia, the owner and chef of Les Iles en Ville, says the EU ban has been “great advertising” - and as a result has moved up seal dishes from occasional specialities to a daily regular.“Seal has become extremely popular since everybody started talking about it,” she said. “We have Canadian diners who want to support the seal industry and we have tourists who had never heard of it before. We get a lot of customers from Europe and they all want to taste seal.”
I’m guessing that most trade disputes—even highly publicized ones—don’t have this aspect, where the dispute increases the demand for the product in dispute. I just have one question at this point: Does it taste like chicken?
What’s Driving the Trade Collapse?
The measured trade-cost rise is estimated to be similar in the two events, yet tariffs have not risen in today’s crisis in anywhere near the extent to which they did in the 1930s. This seems to indicate that a good fraction of today’s trade drop is due to non-tariff trade policy and other trade frictions – e.g. evaporating trade credit, credit constraints in the market for consumer durables, and other reported changes in policy have been of equal magnitude (see Ferrantino and Larsen 2009 on the latter).The best evidence we have on new trade barriers, the Global Trade Alert initiative, does not suggest a rise in measured protectionism anywhere near that observed in the 1930s. There must be something else driving the rise in trade frictions. Perhaps the protection is so murky that even GTA cannot document it? Perhaps the trade credit problem is the culprit and thus more important than many argue (Chauffour and Farole 2009)?
Another way to interpret this finding is that the decline in trade is not due to either of the traditional factors that we think as affecting trade—technology and trade policies.
