Simon Lester

The week began with Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post taking a forceful position against China's currency policies, in an article entitled "Forget Revaluation. Hit China With Tariffs."  The title makes his position pretty clear, but he elaborated as follows: The American challenge is to slow

At the risk of my posts on this blog turning into Dani Rodrik comments exclusively, I have a comment on a short post he did on globalization and income inequality.  He refers to a Wall Street Journal article called "Globalization's Gains Come with a Price," and

A Reuters story today is titled, "Blair says coming weeks are make-or-break for WTO."  Blair is quoted as saying: "The reality is that if we don't get ... the headline agreement in the next two to three weeks then we won't do it."

The full text of the Section 301 currency petition is available here.  The  legal arguments start here.  Here are some excerpts (based on an OCR conversion of a scanned document -- hopefully the text came through OK, but there may be occasional typos): SCM Agreement Article 1/3.1(a)

Forty-two members of Congress have submitted a Section 301 petition in relation to Chinese and Japanese currency valuation.  According to the press release: The petition, filed under section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, calls on the United States Trade Representative to take strong action to end China’s

Lorand Bartels has a draft paper in which he argues that the EU's new GSP+ arrangement is not consistent with WTO rules.  He explains: Under this arrangement, additional tariff preferences (normally duty free treatment), were made available to developing countries committing to ratify and implement a list of

Just two quick points related to Joel's earlier posts about the "new" U.S. approach to trade policy. First, according to the USTR fact sheets on labor and the environment, there is to be a requirement that any alleged labor/environment violations must "affect"

Bloomberg reports that Barack Obama will be getting trade policy advice from Dan Tarullo of Georgetown: The tough task of helping to develop a trade policy that avoids overt protectionism may fall to [Daniel] Tarullo, a 54-year-old trade expert. Tarullo ``escapes easy labeling,'' said former Clinton chief of

So far, Dani Rodrik's blog has been extremely interesting.  In a post today, he says that the issue of "whether we should increase trade restrictions or lower them" is part of the "old debate," and then suggests that today's questions are different: