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Pascal Lamy on Trade Fallacies

In a recent speech (well, not that recent at this point -- I got distracted by other things), WTO DG Pascal Lamy addressed six "trade fallacies": Fallacy #1: Comparative advantage does not work anymore Fallacy #2: It is unhealthy for trade to grow faster and faster compared to
Simon Lester 30 Apr 2010 4 min read

Manufacturing Comes Back to America

From the Daily Show: The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c Wham-O Moves to America www.thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party
Simon Lester 27 Apr 2010 1 min read

Drafting the WTO's "General Exceptions"

Over at Opinio Juris, Roger Alford discusses the different policy exceptions included in the GATT and GATS "General Exceptions," and then says:  " I have yet to discover a satisfactory explanation for the disparate treatment that the WTO drafters have given to the general exceptions in GATT versus
Simon Lester 27 Apr 2010 1 min read

Do BITs Promote Foreign Direct Investment?

From Jason Yackee, on SSRN, a new paper entitled "Do Bilateral Investment Treaties Promote Foreign Direct Investment? Some Hints from Alternative Evidence": In this article I present a multi-method examination of whether bilateral investment treaties, or BITs, are likely to promote inflows of foreign direct investment. Using regression
Simon Lester 27 Apr 2010 1 min read

"Global Competition: Law, Markets and Globalization" by David Gerber

OUP has just published a very interesting, and important, book on the global competition regime. Here is the link. http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Law/?view=usa&ci=9780199228225 and here is the description. Global competition now shapes economies and societies in ways unimaginable only a
Sungjoon Cho 26 Apr 2010 1 min read

Guest Post: Russia-Ukraine Gas Deal: Any potential WTO-related issues?

The Moscow Times has reported that Russia and Ukraine reached a new gas agreement under which Russia would effectively give a 30 percent discount for its gas exports to Ukraine, potentially costing cost Russia approximately $40 billion over the life of the agreement. (see Anatoly Medetsky, “Deal Struck on Gas,
Simon Lester 25 Apr 2010 2 min read

Some Congressional Criticism of the Cotton Deal

Via Sallie James of Cato, I see that four members of Congress want real reform of U.S. cotton subsidies and are not happy with the proposed deal with Brazil: “This proposal takes our federal farm subsidy policy from the impractical to the absurd,” said Rep. Flake.  “We want to
Simon Lester 25 Apr 2010 1 min read

Why the Decline in Anti-Globalization Protests?

Kindred Winecoff notes that anti-globalization protests have died down over the years, and wonders why: I can think of a few possibilities. First, the protests were loudest in the 1990s because of NAFTA (1994), the establishment of the WTO to supplant the GATT (1995), the fairly brutal "Big Bang&
Simon Lester 24 Apr 2010 3 min read

Why Is ACTA Called a "Trade Agreement"?

Following-up on Henning's post, let me ask a very basic question:  Why is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) referred to as a "trade agreement"?  I'm sure this has been discussed somewhere, but I have not come across it. As Henning points out, ACTA appears
Simon Lester 24 Apr 2010 1 min read

Große Ruse-Khan: ACTA – A Draft Trade Agreement with a Potential to Create Trade Barriers?

A guest post from frequent commenter Dr. Henning Große Ruse-Khan ACTA – A Draft Trade Agreement with a Potential to Create Trade Barriers? After years of secrecy and forced by recent leaks (/content/files/files/201001_acta.pdf), the negotiating parties to an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), currently the EU, the
Simon Lester 22 Apr 2010 3 min read

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Is There No Going Back on Trade? What Is the Path Forward? A Response to Lighthizer

Former U.S. Trade Rep. Bob Lighthizer has a new essay in Foreign Affairs, and I have some thoughts. I'm going to start with his brief big picture points on the direction of U.S. trade policy, and then go through a couple of the specific concepts he emphasizes.
27 Apr 2026 6 min read

The Section 301 Excess Capacity Investigation Needs Less Madness, More Method

Shortly after the Supreme Court ruled President Trump’s emergency tariffs under IEEPA  unconstitutional, the administration scrambled to rebuild its tariff wall. While the announcement of Section 122 tariffs immediately following the ruling will provide a temporary patch, the U.S. Trade Representative’s office quickly began to utilize another
24 Apr 2026 6 min read

War Tariffs

This is a co-authored post by Kathleen Claussen and Tim Meyer. Last week, President Trump announced that the United States would be imposing new tariffs of 50 percent of the value of any product coming from any country that sells weapons or provides military aid to Iran. Some commentators questioned
14 Apr 2026 5 min read

USMCA Review and Extension Predictions

When the idea of an expiration clause was suggested during the NAFTA renegotiation, I was against it from the start, and Inu and I wrote a pretty critical piece about it at the time. A review is great, we said, let's definitely have reviews, and there are plenty of ways to do that.
08 Apr 2026 5 min read

The Section 301 Surge Continues: Investigating the Adoption/Enforcement/Administration of Forced Labor Import Bans

This Section 301 investigation intends to pressure all sixty named trade partners (even, inexplicably, including Canada and Mexico) to adopt similar enforcement procedures. This announcement is highly problematic for the four reasons I address below.
16 Mar 2026 4 min read

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