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Simon Lester

Obama on Trade: The Latest

From a soon to be published interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek: In an effort to make U.S. exports more attractive, Obama set a year-end objective for persuading China to allow the value of its currency to rise. “My goal over the course of the next year is for China to

“Free Trade Doesn’t Work”

That’s the title of a new book by Ian Fletcher. (I came across it as a sponsored link in a Google search.) There are a number of different reasons people criticize free trade, so I was curious to see what exactly he had in mind. I asked him for

Government Support for Domestic Companies Building Nuclear Reactors Abroad

The Economist has a piece on competition in the market for building nuclear reactors, in which they discuss how state support for domestic competitors may be playing a role: ... the United Arab Emirates (UAE) completed a tender for four nuclear plants in December, Vietnam is planning a similar deal this

More Asbestos Case Follow-Up

Following-up on this follow-up post, here's more about current disagreements over trade in asbestos: Controversy over asbestos exports continued to dog Quebec Premier Jean Charest right up to the very last day of a trade mission to India. Indian unions and other groups twice called on Charest during

Will the U.S. Challenge the Chicken Parts Anti-Dumping Duties?

From Reuters: China said on Friday it will slap heavy anti-dumping duties on U.S. chicken parts, a move likely to aggravate trade ties between two of the world's most important economies at a time of strained political relations.The Chinese Commerce Ministry's initial investigation showed

More Support for Consumption-Based Carbon Reduction

At Vox, Rahel Aichele and Gabriel Felbermayr explain how production-based carbon reduction can lead to carbon leakage: Production-based CO2 emission targets can give rise to carbon leakage, as firms relocate to countries without carbon policies. This column shows that Kyoto countries’ embodied CO2 imports have been increasing by about 50%

Dan Drezner on China's Great Firewall as a Trade Barrier

His full post: Well, there certainly are a surfeit of Sino - Americantiffsgoing on at the moment . Over at Reason, Ron Bailey offers an intriguing solution to one of these problems -- use the WTO as a crowbar to bring down the Great Firewall of China : When China joined the

Trade Questions for Obama

From Arlen Specter: I have a two-part question, and just a brief statement of the issue. We have lost 2.3 million jobs as a result of the trade imbalance with China between 2001 and 2007. The remedies to save those jobs are very ineffective -- long delays, proceedings before

How Foreign Investment Creates Domestic Jobs

In the WSJ, economist Matthew Slaughter writes: Academic research, including most recently by Harvard's Mihir Desai and Fritz Foley and University of Michigan's James Hines, has consistently found that expansion abroad by U.S. multinationals tends to support jobs based in the U.S. More investment

Vietnam's First WTO Complaint

From Reuters: Vietnam has launched its first dispute at the World Trade Organisation with a case against U.S. anti-dumping measures on its key exports of shrimp. The communist state only joined the global trade arbiter three years ago, and its economy like China's has benefited strongly from