A couple weeks ago, Reuters had this to say about the proposed Interagency Trade Enforcement Center:
Acting Commerce Deputy Secretary Rebecca Blank said $24 million of the new funding would go to the Commerce Department's International Trade Administration (ITA) and the remaining $2 million to the U.S. Trade Representative's office.
The ITA houses the Foreign Commercial Service, which gathers intelligence on foreign markets and promotes U.S. exports around the world, and the Import Administration, which handles anti-dumping and countervailing duty cases.
There was a point I wanted to make about enforcement, but didn't get around to it, and now I see that Dan Ikenson of Cato has said something along the same lines (in the context of short paper on U.S.-China trade relations):
There are important distinctions to draw between enforcement efforts geared toward opening closed markets and protectionist measures designed to close opened markets. But media tend to conflate them and, in the process, obscure important nuances about the U.S.-China economic relationship.
U.S. WTO challenges of discriminatory Chinese policies are not equivalent—economically or morally—to U.S. antidumping, countervailing duty, or safeguard measures imposed on Chinese products. The first is about opening markets; the second is about closing them. The first is about holding China accountable to its commitments; the second is about claiming exceptions to our own commitments. The first is about enforcement; the second is about bestowing favors on some domestic industries at great cost to others.
The United States has filed 12 formal complaints against China, and China has filed 6 formal cases against the United States in the WTO. Those measures have all been about opening markets. Meanwhile, the United States has in place 113 trade remedy measures restricting access of Chinese goods to the U.S. market, and China has in place 20 such measures against the United States. Those measures are all about closing markets.
