Conflicts over currency valuations are a recurrent feature of the modern global economy. To strengthen their international competitiveness, many countries resort to buying foreign currencies to make their exports cheaper and their imports more expensive. In the first decade of the 21st century, for example, China's currency manipulation practices were so flagrant that they produced a backlash in the United States and other trading partners, prompting threats of retaliation. How damaging is the practice of currency manipulation—and how extensive is the problem? This book by C. Fred Bergsten and Joseph E. Gagnon—two leading experts on trade, investment, and the effects of currency manipulation—traces the history, causes, and effects of currency manipulation and analyzes a range of policy responses that the United States could adopt. The book is an indispensable guide to a complex and serious problem and what might be done to solve it.
Based on Mamluk and Venetian sources, this book offers a thorough analysis of the various conflicts arising around Levant trade. It demonstrates how these conflicts more often than not cut across cultural divides in Late Medieval Mamluk Alexandria.
Violent conflict weakens governance, undermines economic development and threatens both national and regional stability. Trade shocks can also have stark impact on conflict. This book sets out to empirically test these linkages between trade shocks and conflict via cross-country and intra-country analysis.
This book unveils a potent new approach to one of the oldest debates in political economy--that over whether class conflict or group competition is more prevalent in politics. It goes further than any study to date by outlining the conditions under which one type of political conflict is more likely than the other. Michael Hiscox focuses on a critical issue affecting support for and opposition to free trade--factor mobility, or the ability of those who own a factor of production (land, labor, or capital) to move it from one industry to another. He argues that the types of political coalitions that form in trade politics depend largely on the extent to which factors are mobile between industries. Class coalitions are more likely where factor mobility is high, Hiscox demonstrates, whereas narrow, industry-based coalitions predominate where it is low. The book also breaks new ground by backing up the theory it advances with systematic evidence from the history of trade politics in six nations over the last two centuries, using a combination of case studies and quantitative analysis. It makes fresh conclusions about the forces shaping trade policy outcomes--conclusions that yield surprising insights into the likely evolution of the global trading system and U.S. trade policy in particular. International Trade and Political Conflict is a major contribution to the scholarly literature while being accessible to anyone interested in understanding and predicting developments in trade policy.
This paper examines the spatial dispersion effects of regional conflicts, defined as internal or external armed conflicts in contiguous states, on international trade. Our empirical findings-based on different measures of conflict constructed using alternate definitions of contiguity and conflict-reveal a significant collateral damage in terms of foregone trade as a result of spillovers from conflict in neighboring countries. The magnitude of this negative externality is somewhat larger for international conflicts than intrastate warfare, but about one-third of conflict in the host economies. Further, the impact is persistent-on average, it takes bilateral trade three years to recover from the end of intrastate conflicts in neighboring states, and five years from international conflicts. These findings are robust to alternate definitions of conflict, estimation methods, and specifications, and underscore the importance of taking into account spillover effects when estimating the economic costs of warfare.
The Estey Centre Journal of International Law and Trade Policy has become required reading among trade policy specialists, not least for Bill Kerr's "Editor's Pages" essay in each volume. Kerr has the ability in a dozen pages to engage, inform and entertain the reader with his careful scholarship, interesting choice of topic and highly-readable style. Kerr sets the tone for the volume and whets the appetite for the other articles. Over the ten years of the Estey Journal's life Kerr's pages have drawn our attention to a range of trade-law topics from the golf-club-like voting rules of the WTO to the delights of sipping incorrectly-labeled port. The decision to bring these twenty short papers together in a volume was inspired. Students and teachers will benefit from the convenience of the collection as source material for classes on trade law and policy. But above all, scholars in the fascinating area of the interplay of economics and law in multilateral trade institutions will have the wisdom of Bill Kerr readily to hand.
A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year: “Tells the history of American trade policy . . . [A] grand narrative [that] also debunks trade-policy myths.” —Economist Should the United States be open to commerce with other countries, or should it protect domestic industries from foreign competition? This question has been the source of bitter political conflict throughout American history. Such conflict was inevitable, James Madison argued in the Federalist Papers, because trade policy involves clashing economic interests. The struggle between the winners and losers from trade has always been fierce because dollars and jobs are at stake: depending on what policy is chosen, some industries, farmers, and workers will prosper, while others will suffer. Douglas A. Irwin’s Clashing over Commerce is the most authoritative and comprehensive history of US trade policy to date, offering a clear picture of the various economic and political forces that have shaped it. From the start, trade policy divided the nation—first when Thomas Jefferson declared an embargo on all foreign trade and then when South Carolina threatened to secede from the Union over excessive taxes on imports. The Civil War saw a shift toward protectionism, which then came under constant political attack. Then, controversy over the Smoot-Hawley tariff during the Great Depression led to a policy shift toward freer trade, involving trade agreements that eventually produced the World Trade Organization. Irwin makes sense of this turbulent history by showing how different economic interests tend to be grouped geographically, meaning that every proposed policy change found ready champions and opponents in Congress. Deeply researched and rich with insight and detail, Clashing over Commerce provides valuable and enduring insights into US trade policy past and present. “Combines scholarly analysis with a historian’s eye for trends and colorful details . . . readable and illuminating, for the trade expert and for all Americans wanting a deeper understanding of America’s evolving role in the global economy.” —National Review “Magisterial.” —Foreign Affairs
Governments around the world? This volume answers these questions on the basis of detailed and rigorous case studies of trade disputes between the United States, Japan, and Europe in aircraft, semiconductors, supercomputers, telecommunications, and other electronics products. Tyson proposes a "cautious activist" policy agenda to promote US competitiveness in high-technology sectors and to strengthen multilateral rules governing high-technology trade.
Why do countries differ so greatly in their patterns of political cleavage and coalition? Extending some basic findings of economic theories of international trade, Ronald Rogowski suggests a startling new answer. Testing his hypothesis chiefly against the evidence of the last century and a half, but extending it also to the ancient world and the sixteenth century, he finds a surprising degree of confirmation and some intriguing exceptions.
Ralph Gomory and William Baumol adapt classical trade models to the modern world economy. In this book Ralph Gomory and William Baumol adapt classical trade models to the modern world economy. Trade today is dominated by manufactured goods, rapidly moving technology, and huge firms that benefit from economies of scale. This is very different from the largely agricultural world in which the classical theories originated. Gomory and Baumol show that the new and significant conflicts resulting from international trade are inherent in modern economies.Today improvement in one country's productive capabilities is often attainable only at the expense of another country's general welfare. The authors describe why and when this is so and why, in a modern free-trade environment, a country might have a vital stake in the competitive strength of its industries.
