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Historically the U.S. sought rules and institutions like the WTO that apply equally to everyone. Under Mr. Trump, the U.S. now crafts its own rules, as it has with China, according to what it considers its own best interest.

USTR says up to 90% of cases against the U.S. have led to a finding that some U.S. law or measure violated WTO commitments. True, the U.S. brings lots of WTO cases and wins the vast majority, but what Mr. Lighthizer focuses on is that the U.S. is sued more often than anyone else despite having among the world’s lowest trade barriers.

The WTO’s Appellate Body tilted the rules further in China’s favor—for example, by making it difficult to punish anticompetitive subsidies that come via state-owned enterprises, which dominate China’s economy.

the prior policy of trying to change China through engagement didn’t work

Mr. Trump’s actions may make U.S. allies more, not less, willing to work with it on China. Perhaps the strongest defense of Mr. Lighthizer’s approach to managing China is that it beats the status quo. He said: “The fact that it’s complicated is not a reason not to try to do it. And even if you have a little extra inefficiency in the system, it’s still worth it because the way we [had] it is absolutely crazy. It’s destined to fail.”

If the U.S. cites national security as its reason for imposing the tariffs in the face of a WTO challenge, it’s unclear how the trade body would respond. “The WTO doesn’t have a lot of experience in adjudicating this sort of dispute,” Oxenford said, noting that the U.S.’s decision to effectively target its allies and geopolitical rivals alike could make the justification seem tenuous. Even if the WTO were to rule against the U.S., it’s unlikely it would change the president’s stance. Trump threatened to pull the U.S. out of the WTO, which he has also accused of being biased against the U.S. “We lose almost all of the lawsuits within the WTO because we have fewer judges than other countries,” Trump said in October. “It’s set up. You can’t win.”

Brussels plans to challenge any U.S. tariffs at the WTO, possibly with other trading partners.

A fundamental question U.S. allies are struggling to address is whether the Trump administration wants to work through the WTO.

The Trump administration’s strategy is two-pronged. First, to dust off little-used American laws allowing for unilateral imposition of tariffs and quotas without seeking WTO permission

Second, to essentially threaten to shut down the WTO’s dispute-settlement mechanism, unless it enacts reforms demanded by the U.S

“I don’t like to use the word ‘trade war,’ but I can’t say how this wouldn’t be warlike behavior.”

Promising to “defend European jobs,” European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said

that it would retaliate against any metals tariffs, saying it had put together a package of penalties that would affect a total of $3.5 billion in U.S. exports, including Harley-Davidson motorcycles, bourbon and denim

The U.S. imported $20.5 billion in German passenger cars in 2017. The U.S. charges tariffs of 2.5% on most cars from countries with which it doesn’t have a free-trade agreement, and 25% on pickup trucks. The EU has a tariff of 10% on car imports under WTO rules.

Mr. Trump on Saturday also criticized the global goods deficit of more than $800 billion that the U.S. ran up last year, faulting the nation’s “very stupid” trade deals. “Our jobs and wealth are being given to other countries that have taken advantage of us for years.

It remains unclear which countries may be hit by the metals tariffs. The president said he would provide more details next week.

he said. Shares in BMW, along with Daimler AG and Volkswagen AG , fell in the wake of Mr. Trump’s comments. Mr. Trump didn’t follow through on that threat.

In January 2017, Mr. Obama’s administration launched a case at the WTO against China for subsidizing aluminum

Mr. Trump has failed to follow up. Last week, Mr. Trump invoked a little-used 1962 statute to promise tariffs of 25% on imported steel and 10% on aluminum, ostensibly for national security, a factor that led his chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, to announce his resignation Tuesday.

Chinese forced technology transfer, commercial espionage and intellectual-property theft, all aimed at creating Chinese champions in key industries by 2025

Yet China exports little steel to the U.S. because of existing duties and accounts for just 11% of its aluminum imports, far behind Canada. The Commerce Department argued for a global remedy because Chinese production depresses global prices and drives foreign producers out of third markets, and they then ship to the U.S.

It noted that since 2003 China has four times promised to address overcapacity in steel production, as its actual capacity quadrupled to roughly half the world total. “The crisis confronting the U.S. aluminum industry is China, plain and simple,” one industry group told the department.

When the EU threatened to retaliate, Mr. Trump said he would escalate by raising duties on European cars.

This means the pain of Mr. Trump’s tariffs will fall not on China but on actors that play by the rules, including Canada, Japan and the European Union.

The U.S. is preparing a sweeping penalty against China, but it would be more effective if done jointly; otherwise, Beijing may simply persuade others to hand over their technology in exchange for Chinese sales or capital.

S., EU and Japan launched a joint WTO complaint against China for restricting exports of “rare earths,” which are vital to many advanced technologies.

In 2014, they won and China lifted its restrictions. One former U.S. trade official says the U.S. could create a similar united front against Chinese takeovers of technology companies: “That would get their attention.” Nor would it violate WTO rules, which are less restrictive on investment than tariffs, he said.

“We are much more likely to get our allies to work with us if we aren’t punishing them for selling us steel that our consumers want to buy.”

It also subsidised wheat, fertiliser and diesel to fuel water pumps.

Those for electricity make power more affordable, but leave the distribution network underfunded

To compensate, commercial consumers pay up to four times more for power, helping make Indian manufacturers uncompetitive.

During the worst of the covid slump, many economists counselled boosting demand by giving cash to the hardest hit. The government’s biggest initiative instead propped up manufacturers, encouraging them to invest where bureaucrats think they should by offering “production-linked incentives” to make things like solar panels. In other words, it offered subsidies.

A World Trade Organisation (WTO) agreement required India to phase out varied export-promotion subsidies by 2016.

Instead the country ramped up several programmes, earning in 2019 a sharp reprimand from the WTO

Farmers hurry to clear the rice harvest before planting spring wheat, burning off stubble in a vast pall of acrid smoke.

We know that, in the United States, 90 plus percent of staple crops like corn are genetically modified, along with 94 percent of soybeans and 94 percent of cotton. A ban on GMOs in food production would radically change the entire food supply. In Russia, however, the country is much more poised for a GMO food revolution. [

President Vladimir Putin believes that he can keep GMOs out of the country, even while staying in compliance with the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) commandments. In a past meeting addressing the members of the Board of the Russian F

deration Council he stated:

The postwar boom, when measured by the purchasing power of the average paycheck, continued into the early 1970s and then abruptly stoppe

Starting in 2000, two related developments added to worsening conditions for the middle and working classes.

that year marked the end of net upward mobility. Before 2000, the size of both the lower and middle classes had shrunk, while the percentage of households with inflation-adjusted incomes of $100,000 or more grew. Americans were moving up the ladder.

After 2000, the middle class continued to shrink, but so did the percentage of households making $100,000 or more. The only group to grow larger after 2000 was households with incomes of $35,000 or less. Americans were moving down the ladder.

The second adverse trend is that trade with China, which shot up after China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in December 2001, imposed far larger costs on American workers than most economists anticipated

If one had to project the impact of China’s momentous economic reform for the U.S. labor market with nothing to go on other than a standard undergraduate economics textbook, one would predict large movements of workers between U.S. tradable industries (say, from apparel and furniture to pharmaceuticals and jet aircraft), limited reallocation of jobs from tradables to non-tradables, and no net impacts on U.S. aggregate employment. The reality of adjustment to the China shock has been far different. Employment has certainly fallen in U.S. industries most exposed to import competition. But so too has overall employment in local labor markets in which these industries were concentrated. Offsetting employment gains either in export-oriented tradables or in non-tradables have, for the most part, failed to materialize.

High wage workers find it relatively easy to adjust and “do not experience an earnings loss,” argue Autor and his colleagues. Low wage workers, in contrast, “suffer large differential earnings loss, as they obtain lower earnings per year both while working at the initial firm and after relocating to new employers.”

The recipe for populism seems pretty clear: take a surge in manufacturing imports from China and continued automation in the US workplace and add a tepid macroeconomy. The result is a combustible stew sure to sour the stomach of party leaders nationwide.

The stew, to continue Hanson’s metaphor, began to boil over with the cataclysmic financial collapse in September 2008, which many people left and right felt was caused by reckless financial engineering on Wall Street. The collapse and the destruction it left in its wake was, without question, the most important economic and political event in recent years.

“It was the financial crisis, what it revealed about government-Wall Street links, and the fumbling of the response to it that put the nail in the coffin of trust in government,

, TARP insulated the very institutions and executives that caused the collapse and the disastrous recession that followed.

The widespread sense that all the elites in Washington and New York conspired to bail out the miscreants who caused the disaster and then gave them bonuses, while the rest of us lost our houses or saw their value, the biggest and often only asset of Americans, plummet, lost our jobs or saw them frozen and stagnant, and then saw gaping inequality grow even more, is just palpable.

On Jan. 10, 2010, the Supreme Court granted those in upper income brackets additional privileges in its Citizens United decision (buttressed by subsequent lower court rulings) that allowed wealthy individuals, corporations and unions to make unlimited political contributions. By opening the door to the creation of SuperPACs and giving Wall Street and other major financial sectors new ways to buy political outcomes, the courts gave the impression, to say the least, that they favored establishment interests over those of the less well off.

A Bloomberg poll last September found that 78 percent of voters would like to see Citizens United overturned, and this view held across a range of partisan loyalties: Republicans at 80 percent; Democrats at 83; and independents at 71.

. Obamacare, a program many in the white middle and working classes perceived as reducing their own medical care in order to provide health coverage to the disproportionately minority poor.

By the midterm elections of 2010, voter dissatisfaction among whites found expression in the Tea Party movement, which produced the sweeping defeat of Democrats in competitive congressional districts as well as of moderate and center-right Republicans in primary contests.Voter anger was directed at two targets — the “undeserving rich” and the “undeserving poor.”

To many of those who cast their ballots in anger in 2010 and 2014, however, it appeared that their votes had not changed anything. Obamacare stayed in place, Wall Street and corporate America grew richer, while the average worker was stuck going nowhere.

Already disillusioned with the Democratic Party, these white voters became convinced that the mainstream of the Republican Party had failed them, not only on economic issues, but on cultural matters as well.

A September 2015 Ispos survey asked voters if they agreed or disagreed with the statement “More and more, I don’t identify with what America has become.” 72 percent of surveyed Republicans concurred, compared to 58 percent of independents and 45 percent of Democrats. Two thirds of Republicans, 62 percent, agreed with the statement “These days I feel like a stranger in my own country,” compared to 53 percent of independents and 37 percent of Democrats. Here is one place where Trump’s scathing dismissal of political correctness found fertile ground.

If he prevails, a constituency that could force politicians to confront the problems of the working and middle class will waste its energies on a candidate incompetent to improve the lives of the credulous men and women lining up to support him.

the consequences of disillusionment with old guard Republicans:The intersection of inequality driven by real wage/income stagnation and the fact that the folks perceived to have blown the damn economy up not only recovered first, but got government assistance in the form of bailouts to do so. If you’re in the anxious middle and that doesn’t deeply piss you off, you’re an unusually forgiving person.

This election has demonstrated that there is no Republican Party organization, per se. The Republican Party exists as an array of allied groups, incumbent office holders, media organizations, and funding vehicles (e.g., SuperPACs, 501(c)(4)s, and the like). When people ask why the “establishment” or “the party” has not done anything to stop Trump, it is not exactly clear who they mean.

The tragedy of the 2016 campaign is that Trump has mobilized a constituency with legitimate grievances on a fool’s errand.If he is shoved out of the field somehow, his supporters will remain bitter and enraged, convinced that a self-serving and malign elite defeated their leader.

In these circumstances, Bernstein wrote, the logic supporting the traditional Republican Party fell apart:The core theme of Republican establishment lore has been to demonize not unregulated finance or trade or inequality, but ‘the other’ – e.g., the immigrant or minority taking your job and claiming unneeded government support. And yet, none of their trickle down, deregulatory agenda helped ameliorate the problem at all. So they lost control.

Missing in your narrative were 2 other factors that contributed to American anger and the turn to Mr. Trump. Those two factors are: the group of very wealthy American's who were convened by the Koch brothers to pool their resources to destroy President Obama and the Congressional Democrats and moderate Republicans, e.g. Senator Lugar.

were suffering from a major contraction and the drying up of credit & jobs and the President unwisely & wrongly appointed the Simpson-Bowles commission to rein in the debt. Remember Harvard's Rogoff & Reinhart who came up with that Debt to GDP ratio? And the rally of our elites & Pete Peterson et al that Deficits were the problem, when the truth, based on history, was just the opposite.

The 2nd factor which can also be attributed to the White House as well as Democrats in the Congress who joined Republicans in misdiagnosing the problem as deficits and debt.

a large minority still want to saddle up unicorns and ride back to lost terrain. They cry “WTO transition”, “Malthouse compromise”, “Brady amendment” as if these were negotiable concepts and not exotic acts in the clammy circus tent of Eurosceptic imagination.

Another frustration is that British politicians are incapable of telling their voters the truth about difficult trade-offs. Some officials and leaders think the value of EU partnership will only be grasped once the benefits of membership are lost and the task in hand is buying them back

Continental leaders thought the pragmatic diplomat they dealt with in Brussels was the real Britain and the spittle-spraying nationalist was a stock character, strutting the repertory stage. It turns out to be the other way around. Or rather, the Conservative party has strapped the grimacing mask so tightly to its face that it is no longer a mask. Those are now the distorted features we show to the world.

It predicts the slowdown will come as stimulus measures, such as near-zero interest rates and quantitative easing, begin to lose their effectiveness.

The Mexican government said that the US action was not justified, and that it would retaliate with its own comparable penalties on US products including lamps, pork, fruit, cheese and flat steel.

The Trump administration surprised observers on Tuesday by announcing it would impose tariffs on $50 billion worth of Chinese goods and restrict Chinese investment in the United States.

Steel industry groups called on politicians in affected countries to defend their companies and workers. Eurofer, the European Steel Association, asked EU leaders to "react accordingly with appropriate and proportionate measures."

imposing a 45 percent tariff on all imports from China. However, in addition to exiting the 12-country Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Trump’s provocative rhetoric continues to keep U.S. trading partners on edge.

Trump used his participation in the NATO and G-7 summits in part to criticize German Chancellor Angela Merkel over the U.S.-Germany trade relationship

To create future disincentives for free-riding, parties to the agreement may seek ways to punish the U.S. for its behavior.

rump has proposed significant budget cuts for the Environmental Protection Agency that, if adopted, would cut spending by 31 percent and eliminate 25 percent of the agency’s 15,000 jobs

Second, Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris agreement politically isolates the U.S. from many of its key trading partners

Given its policy decisions on climate change and the environment, the Trump administration may have difficulty achieving this objective in future settings, such as NAFTA renegotiations

The administration also risks appearing hypocritical if it brings disputes over environmental commitments or dumping in green technologies such as solar panels up for resolution at the WTO

Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement is a terrible misjudgment that will have lasting ramifications for the Earth’s climate and U.S. global leadership of the postwar liberal international order. The decision could also undermine America’s trading competitiveness, an issue Trump claims to champion, while causing the kind of economic harm that he says he wants to avoid by leaving the climate accord. U.S. policymakers must remain vigilant to avoid a trade war that could further damage the economic interests of American companies, workers and citizens.

"Companies that exploit their workers have no place doing business in the United States," said Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas in a statement. "Products made from forced labor not only exploit workers, but hurt American businesses and expose consumers to unethical purchases."

Earlier this week, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai also called attention to the issue of forced labor on fishing vessels, submitting a proposal to the World Trade Organization to curb subsidies to fishing activities that involve the use of forced labor and requiring that member countries recognize the problem.

The Trump administration, during its last week in office, implemented a ban on the import of cotton and tomato products from China's Xinjiang region. The sweeping prohibition followed allegations that products were being produced by Uighur Muslims working under involuntary conditions and forced labor.

In September, in a similar effort, the U.S. prohibited the import of certain Chinese-made hair products, apparel and computer parts over concerns of forced labor — again in the Xinjiang region.

"DHS will continue to aggressively investigate the use of forced labor by distant water fishing vessels, and by a wide range of other industries," said Secretary Mayorkas in a news briefing. "Producers and U.S. importers alike should understand that there will be consequences for entities that attempt to exploit workers to sell goods in the United States." Facebook Twitter Flipboard Email

Beyond the 2020 horizon, trade arrangements between many African countries and a fully-Brexited UK are also set to remain the same under a number of "continuity agreements". These basically say that the trade conditions (tariffs, quotas, standards and so on) remain the same as they are currently between a number of African countries and trading blocs and the EU.

Outside the big EU gang, the UK, technically, has less negotiating clout. That could mean that the African countries that trade with the UK may be able to squeeze out slightly more preferential terms in negotiations. Perhaps.

Flowers are one of Kenya's biggest exports and foreign currency earners. The industry is also a major employer, providing 100,000 people with direct work and around two million indirectly.

As far as African companies are concerned, the post-Brexit world will depend very much on the nature of their business with both the EU and the UK. "Companies that depend heavily on EU-related preferences in the UK market need to keep a watchful eye on developments in Europe; and on negotiations between the UK and their own country on future arrangements," says Matthew Stern at DNA Economics in Pretoria.

Last month, President Biden’s trade representative, Katherine Tai, notified the World Trade Organization that the American government no longer supported a proposal it once spearheaded that would have exported the American laissez-faire approach to tech. Had that proposal been adopted, it would have spared tech companies the headache of having to deal with many different domestic laws about how data must be handled, including rules mandating that it be stored or analyzed locally. It also would have largely shielded tech companies from regulations aimed at protecting citizens’ privacy and curbing monopolistic behavior.

The move to drop support for that digital trade agenda has been pilloried as disaster for American companies and a boon to China, which has a host of complicated restrictions on transferring data outside of China. “We have warned for years that either the United States would write the rules for digital trade or China would,” Senator Mike Crapo, a Republican from Idaho, lamented in a press statement. “Now, the Biden administration has decided to give China the pen.”

While some of this agenda is reasonable and good for the world — too much regulation stifles innovation — adopting this agenda wholesale would risk cementing the advantages that big American tech companies already enjoy and permanently distorting the market in their favor.

who used to answer the phone and interact with lobbyists at the U.S. trade representative’s office. The paper includes redacted emails between Trump-era trade negotiators and lobbyists for Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Amazon, exchanging suggestions for the proposed text for the policy on digital trade in the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. “While they were previously ‘allergic to Washington,’ as one trade negotiator described, over the course of a decade, technology companies hired lobbyists and joined trade associations with the goal of proactively influencing international trade policy,” Ms. Li wrote in the Socio-Economic Review.

That paper explains how U.S. trade officials came to champion a digital trade policy agenda that was nearly identical to what Google, Apple and Meta wanted: No restrictions on the flow of data across borders. No forced disclosure of source codes or algorithms in the normal course of business. No laws that would curb monopolies or encourage more competition — a position that is often cloaked in clauses prohibiting discrimination against American companies. (Since so many of the monopolistic big tech players are American, rules targeting such behavior disproportionately fall on American companies, and can be portrayed as unfair barriers to trade.)

The truth is that Ms. Tai is taking the pen away from Meta, Google and Amazon, which helped shape the previous policy, according to a research paper published this year by Wendy Li,

This approach essentially takes the power to regulate data out of the hands of governments and gives it to technology companies, according to research by Henry Gao, a Singapore-based expert on international trade.

Many smaller tech companies complain that big players engage in monopolistic behavior that should be regulated. For instance, Google has been accused of privileging its own products in search results, while Apple has been accused of charging some developers exorbitant fees to be listed in its App Store. A group of smaller tech companies called the Coalition for App Fairness thanked Ms. Tai for dropping support for the so-called tech-friendly agenda at the World Trade Organization.

Still, Ms. Tai’s reversal stunned American allies and foreign business leaders and upended negotiations over digital trade rules in the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, one of Mr. Biden’s signature initiatives in Asia.

The about-face was certainly abrupt: Japan, Singapore and Australia — which supported the previous U.S. position — were left on their own. It’s unfortunate that U.S. allies and even some American officials were taken by surprise. But changing stances was the right call.

The previous American position at the World Trade Organization was a minority position. Only 34 percent of countries in the world have open data transfer policies like the United States, according to a 2021 World Bank working paper, while 57 percent have adopted policies like the European Union’s, which allow data to flow freely but leave room for laws that protect privacy and personal data.

Nine percent of countries have restrictive data transfer policies, including Russia and China.

The United States now has an opportunity to hammer out a sensible global consensus that gives tech companies what they need — clarity, more universal rules, and relative freedom to move data across borders — without shielding them from the kinds of regulations that might be required to protect society and competition in the future.

If the Biden administration can shepherd a digital agreement that strikes the right balance, there’s a chance that it will also restore faith in free trade by showing that trade agreements don’t have to be written by the powerful at the expense of the weak.