Joan Robinson, criticizing false rigor, was fond of saying that "an elephant is hard to define but easy to recognize! " I wonder if this metaphor applies to the issue of "unfairness" in international trade. I say that because I have noticed that many recent posts on this blog were, one way or another, in relation with the theme of unfairness. People criticizing China's currency policy invoke its "unfair" nature. As for the debate about the integration of labor and environmental standards in bilateral agreements, it is practically a disguised debate about the notion of unfairness in international trade.
Most people intervening in these debates seem to know "intuitively" what is unfairness. For my part, I have always implicitly adopted this intuitive perspective and following my research on the law of subsidies, I have implicitly adopted the notion that unfairness is an artificial distortion of the principle of comparative advantage between nations. I have tried recently to apply this perspective to the china's currency issue and to labor standards in bilateral agreements and my feeling is that this notion is too simplistic for such a complex reality. I am more and more convinced that every trade lawyer has his or her implicit individual definition of unfairness in international trade. I have also noticed that in one of her comments, Julia Qin thinks that fairness in international trade is a "myth" created for political conveniency. Is it possible that a myth is so frequently invoked by so many persons , organizations and panel and AB reports ? However, it is true that most of the time people and organizations invoking unfairness avoid at any cost to define it. In fact, when forced, they adopt implicitly the definition of unfairness as an "artificial" distortion of comparative advantages between nations. This definition is in fact a tautology since the real issue is to know the meaning to be given to the adjective "artificial" in this definition.
