After more than half a century in which the United States led international trade liberalization, the country has been in a long stalemate over trade policy. It has been losing ground as other nations enter into market-opening arrangements that disadvantage U.S.-based production. In an increasingly competitive global economy, the policies of the past no longer offer a road map for the future. U.S. Trade Policy assesses current U.S. trade policy and analyzes issues of trade policy authority, trade negotiations, investment rules, competition policy, regulatory barriers, exchange rates, and export controls.

This report argues that closing the political divide on trade will require measures that respond to the American public's ambivalence and are more explicitly designed to maximize the economic benefits that come from trade openings by increasing exports and attracting job creating investment. It also offers recommendations for trade and investment policies the United States should adopt that will help to create jobs and raise incomes for more Americans while also advancing foreign policy interests.

Economists have repeatedly warned against them, NGOs have fought them, and some governments have begrudgingly (at least in appearance) signed them. Yet, in the last twenty years the growth in number of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) has been unabated. Even more strikingly, their scope has broadened while their number was increasing. Deep integration provisions in PTAs have now become ubiquitous. Gaining market access or preserving existing preferences has remained an important motivation for acceding to PTAs. But with the liberalization of trade around the world and the related diminishing size of preferential rents, the growing success of PTAs cannot be only explained by traditional market access motives (even factoring for the possible substitution of tariff for other less transparent forms of protection). Countries are looking beyond market access in PTAs. They are interested in a host of objectives, including importing higher policy standards, strengthening regional policy coordination, locking-in domestic reforms, and even addressing foreign policy issues. This handbook on PTA policies for development offers an introduction into the world of modern preferential trade agreements. It goes beyond the traditional paradigm of trade creation versus trade diversion to address the economic and legal aspects of the regulatory policies that are contained in today s PTAs. The book maps the landscape of PTAs, summarizes the theoretical arguments, political economy, and development dimensions of PTAs, and presents the current practice in the main policy areas typically covered in PTAs (from agriculture policy, rules of origin, customs unions, trade remedies, product standards, technical barriers, to behind the border issues related to investment, trade facilitation, competition, government procurement, intellectual property, labor rights, human rights, environment, migration, and dispute resolution). These are also usually the policies driven by powerful trading blocs as they strive to influence the evolution of the global trading system."

This paper undertakes a comparative empirical assessment of economic reforms and exports in the rising Asian giants, China and India. It explores the past record and future challenges. In recent years, China has surged ahead of India to dominate world manufactured exports, but India has acquired competitive capabilities in skill-intensive services. Favorable initial conditions (e.g., large markets and low-cost productive labor) shaped the giants' success. While the gradual switch to market-oriented reforms in the late-1970s drove trade-led growth in the giants, China was swifter and more coordinated. It introduced an open door policy towards foreign direct investment (FDI), actively facilitated technological upgrading of FDI, steadily liberalized a controlled import regime, ensured a competitive exchange rate, and concluded more comprehensive free trade agreements (FTAs) with Asian developing economies. India has attempted to enact economic reforms since 1991, particularly to attract FDI and liberalize imports. Therefore, one might expect the gap in trade performance between China and India to narrow over time. However, both giants face an uncertain world economy after the global financial crisis, and future success will depend on evolving reforms. Critical areas are how the giants respond to integrating with production networks, promote technology development, manage real exchange rates, and mitigate the risk of protectionism.

Henderson surveys the amount of foreign business in Japan, points out the special characteristics of these businesses, describes the products and nationality of the foreign subsidiaries and branches, and explores the management practices as they compare with those indigenous with most Japanese business. After a general treatment of the Japanese legal system, the author points out the contracting, incorporating, and dispute resolution devices useful to foreign enterprise.
Originally published in 1973.
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This monograph reviews the efficacy of economic statecraft vis- -vis North Korea, with a particular focus on the use of sanctions and inducements on the part of the United States in seeking to achieve nonproliferation and wider foreign policy objectives. Two structural constraints operate: North Korea's particularly repressive state, with a narrowing governing coalition; and the country's changing economic relations. As an empirical matter, there is little evidence that sanctions had effect, or did so only in conjunction with inducements. However, inducements did not yield significant results either, in part because of severe credibility and sequencing problems in the negotiations.

In recent years, Africa has emerged as a dominant region in China 's foreign policy. As an emerging center of economic growth in the world economy, China is striving towards establishing a stronger footprint in Africa than ever before. The need to understand this rapprochement has been exacerbated by the current financial crisis. With focus on agricultural trade, this book uses empirical data spanning up to year end 2007 to explain the potential benefits of China growing trade in Africa on South Africa 's economy. The studies cover both China and South Africa 's positions as importer and exporter of agricultural products in each other 's markets. In doing so, they have carefully analyzed data from Chinese and South African sources. In order to give a fresh perspective to the analyses, a section of the work has been devoted to the nature of non-tariff barriers that face South Africa 's exporters into the Chinese market.

The U.S.-Singapore FTA has taken on new importance in trade policy because the United States is engaged in negotiations to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). In addition, the U.S.-Singapore FTA has provided greater access for U.S. companies, has been instrumental in increasing bilateral trade, and has provided reassurance to Singaporeans of U.S. interest in the country. As a city-state, Singapore operates as an entrepot with essentially free trade. Under the FTA, concessions dealt mainly with providing greater access for American service providers and with strengthening the business environment in areas such as the protection of intellectual property rights and access to government procurement. This book examines the U.S.-Singapore Free Trade Agreement in detail, as well as the documented effects after five years.

From the former First Lady of Egypt, New York Times best-selling author, crusader for women's rights, and widow of the slain Nobel Peace Prize winner Anwar Sadat, comes a timely, clear-eyed examination of the defining issues of the Middle East.

`East Asia is the region of the world that is changing fastest in terms of trade arrangements. Dozens of free-trade agreements are signed every year, turning a complex situation into the East Asian "noodle bowl" of FTAs. This book addresses the crucial question posed by these new agreements - how do they affect business? While many studies have focused on government-to-government issues, this book gets to the heart of the matter, studying what it means for the firms actually doing the trade and investment. I recommend this book to any serious student of trade, particularly those interested in understanding the rapidly evolving landscape in this most dynamic part of the world.' - Richard Baldwin, Professor of International Economics, Graduate Institute, Geneva, Switzerland `The pursuit of more than one hundred Free Trade Agreements in East Asia is quietly producing a fundamental change in the global economic architecture. This path-breaking new volume provides an indispensable guide to the practical effect of such agreements on commercial transactions in the region. It is a must-read for businessmen and policymakers who seek to both understand the impact of FTAs in the real world and expand their contributions to economic growth and development.' - C. Fred Bergsten, Director, Peterson Institute for International Economics, US `[East Asia] needs to think about appropriate measures to overcome the Asian FTA noodle bowl in the future. In this vein, the study suggests several practical measures including encouraging rationalization and flexibility of rules of origin, upgrading origin administration, improving business participation in FTA consultations, and strengthening institutional support systems for SMEs. . . It is hoped that this study will contribute to strengthening regional trade policies in Asia and compatibilities with global trade rules.' - Haruhiko Kuroda, President, Asian Development Bank `This is a valuable contribution in a crowded field. Kawai and Wignaraja have gone beyond familiar arguments about the relative merits of regionalism and multilateralism to ask businesses what it all means to them. Policymakers should take note.' - Patrick Low, Chief Economist, WTO `For policymakers in the region, the debate is no longer between regionalism and multilateralism. The real question is how we should create the model for regionalism that will become the building blocks to a multilateral trading system and avoid raising costs of doing business from the noodle bowl effect. Therefore the comparative and micro-level research found in this book provides valuable insights on the impact of FTAs on businesses. These insights will be relevant input as policymakers forge ahead in implementing regional FTAs, thinking of ways to amend and improve on them and, most importantly, harmonize or consolidate between existing regional FTAs in East Asia.' - Mari Pangestu, Minister of Trade, Indonesia The spread of Asia's free trade agreements (FTAs) has sparked an important debate on the impact of such agreements on business activity. This pioneering study uses new evidence from surveys of East Asian exporters - including Japan, the People's Republic of China, the Republic of Korea and three ASEAN economies of the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand - to shed light on the FTA debate. Critics are concerned that FTAs erode the multilateral trading process and foster an alarming `noodle bowl' of overlapping regulations and rules of origin requirements - which may be costly to business. Asia's Free Trade Agreements makes key recommendations for improving business use of FTA preferences, reducing costs of FTAs and creating a region-wide FTA. This well-researched and documented book will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students in international business, international economics, economic development, public administration and public policy. Academics, researchers and members of think-tanks around the world will also benefit from this book as will trade negotiators and trade policy officials from developed and developing countries.

This report addresses carbon labeling schemes, a high-profile issue and one that has important economic implications for developing countries. Carbon accounting and labeling instruments are designed to present information on greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) from supply chains. These instruments have become an important awareness-raising channel for governments, producers, retailers and consumers to bring about the reduction of GHGs. At the same time, they have emerged as a crucial element of supply chain management, trade logistics and, potentially, trade regulations between countries. But the underlying science of GHG emissions is only partially developed. Many of these schemes are based on rudimentary knowledge of GHG emissions and have mainly been designed by industrialized countries. There is a concern that these systems do not accurately reflect production processes in developing countries, and that they may even shift consumer preferences away from developing country exports. The report includes an analysis of current and emerging carbon labeling schemes and an assessment of available data, emissions factors and knowledge gaps of carbon footprinting methodologies. The report also analyzes carbon accounting methodologies for sugar and pineapple products from Zambia and Mauritius according to PAS 2050 guidelines, to illustrate whether these schemes accurately represent the production systems in developing countries. The report concludes with a series of recommendations on how carbon footprint labeling can be made more development-friendly

Professor Booth provides an incisive analysis of the performance of the ASEAN economies since the 1997 financial crisis. The major economies, including Singapore, have failed fully to recover the growth momentum that they enjoyed before the crisis. The major explanations for this disappointing recovery are reviewed and it is argued that the key factors include deep seated structural problems that were already coming to the fore before the 1997 crisis. This is particularly the case for Indonesia and Thailand, where successive governments have found it extremely difficult effectively to address these problems. This inability, combined with changes in the regional and global economies, has left these countries vulnerable to adverse trading and financial conditions.

This book is about how the WTO functions as a public organization. It analyzes and evaluates the WTO from a public administration perspective which is absent from the current debate on WTO reforms dominated by the traditional view that only nation states matter, not international organizations.

This book fills a large gap in the literature on trade in services. It focuses on the dynamics of trade and investment liberalization in a sector of considerable technical and regulatory complexity financial services. This volume chronicles the recent experiences of governments in Latin America that have successfully completed financial services negotiations through preferential trade agreements. One of the unique features of this book is the three in-depth country case studies Chile, Colombia, and Costa Rica all written by trade experts who led the negotiations of their respective countries in financial services. The authors offer analytical insights into the substantive content of the legal provisions governing financial market opening and the way such provisions have evolved over time and across negotiating settings. The studies describe how each of the three governments organized the conduct of negotiations in the sector, the extent of preparatory work undertaken before and during negotiations, and the negotiating road maps that were put in place to guide negotiators. Additional chapters complement the case studies by examining the evolving architecture of trade and investment disciplines in financial services and how best to prepare for negotiations in this sector. 'Financial Services and Preferential Trade Agreements' aims to provide practical lessons for policy makers, trade experts, and negotiators in developing countries who are involved in negotiating trade in financial services in the context of regional trade agreements. Academics and development practitioners interested in trade negotiations will also find the information valuable."

A major contribution to the field of comparative state formation and the scholarship on long-term political development of Latin America "Ambitious and rich. . . . A sweeping and general theory of state formation and detailed historical reconstruction of essential events in Latin American political development. It combines structural elements with a novel emphasis on the political incentives and bargaining that shaped the map we have today."-Hillel David Soifer, Governance Latin American governments systematically fail to provide the key public goods for their societies to prosper. Sebastian Mazzuca argues that the secret of Latin America's failure is that its states were "born weak," in contrast to states in western Europe, North America, and Japan. State formation in post-Independence Latin America occurred in a period when capitalism, rather than war, was the key driver forging countries. In pursuing the short-term benefits of international trade, Latin American leaders created states with chronic weaknesses, notably patrimonial administrations and dysfunctional regional combinations. Mazzuca analyzes pathways leading to variations in country size and level of pacification: "port-led" state formation in Argentina and Brazil; "party-led" in Mexico, Colombia, and Uruguay; and "lord-led" in Central America, Venezuela, and Peru.

This paper proposes improving anti-dumping 's (AD) procedural institutions by enhancing the quality of public governance in the formulation of AD decisions by national authorities. It further examines the AD practices and laws of China and South Africa, arguing that poor governance in emerging economies contributes to their prolific use of AD, usually disproportionate to their small share of world imports. These economies already maintain higher tariff barriers than industrial countries, so that without effective steps to ensure better governance to restrain the arbitrary and proliferating use of AD, they may lose out significantly on the gains from the trade liberalization for which they have been striving for decades.

Trade negotiations are a topic of growing importance, and the popularity of bilateral and regional trade deals as an alternative to slow negotiations at the World Trade Organization (WTO) is growing. But so is the anti-free trade sentiment among environmental and social-justice associations. Today, an important question is how free trade can be designed in a sustainable way. Based on the theoretical concept of two-level diplomacy, Astrid Fritz Carrapatoso analyzes whether domestic consultations help to further integrate trade-related environmental issues into trade agreements. Because the domestic dimension of international negotiations is often neglected, this study focuses on consultation procedures between the government and interest groups. Determinants for the integration of environmental aspects into trade agreements can thus be worked out. The book is aimed at scholars and students in the field of social sciences, economics, environmental studies, journalists interested in global and regional trade issues as well as environmental themes, politicians dealing with trade and environment issues and NGOs and other interest groups working in the environmental and/or trade sector.

Over the past 10 years, the content and application of international trade law has grown dramatically. The WTO created a binding dispute settlement process and in resolving disputes, the judicial organs of the WTO have built up a substantial amount of new international trade law. Emerging from this new WTO process is an international trade law system that is in some respects self-contained and in other respects overlapping and linked to other international legal, economic and political regimes. The 'boundaries' of trade law are now generating enormous interest and controversy which, at a broader level, is subsumed within the debate over globalisation. The detailed development of the rules of international trade is being examined with increasing frequency by scholars, government officials and trade law practitioners. But how does it fit with existing systems? How it is modified by them? How does the international trade law system affect and modify other regimes? This Handbook places international trade law within its broader context, providing comment and critique on contemporary thinking on a range of questions both related specifically to the discipline of international trade law itself and to the outside face of international trade law and its intersection with States and other aspects of the international system. It examines the economic and institutional context of the world trading system, its substantive law (including regional trade regimes) and the settlement of disputes. The final part of the book explores the wider framework of the world trading system, considering issues including the relationship of the WTO to civil society, the use of economic sanctions, state responsibility, and the regulation of multinational corporations. Oxford Handbooks offer authoritative and up-to-date surveys of original research in a particular subject area. Specially commissioned essays from leading figures in the discipline give critical examinations of the progress and direction of debates. Oxford Handbooks provide scholars and graduate students with compelling new perspectives upon a wide range of subjects in the humanities and social sciences.

Visa processing barriers limiting inbound international business and pleasure travelers cost the United States economy billions of dollars in direct revenues while severing vital communications links to the Arab market. Total Arab market import demand has more than doubled since the year 2001, but US corporations attempting to close deals are stymied by visa barriers that turn away even longtime Arab business visitors, including trainees seeking to enter the US. The US has already lost US$62 billion in merchandise trade to competitors maintaining "open door" visa policies through 2005. Cumulative opportunity cost losses are on track to reach a total of $101 billion in 2006 as "turnkey" infrastructure projects, defense, consumer goods, and industrial machinery deals flow to US competitors. IRmep presents specific recommendations for avoiding permanent damage to vital trade and communications links between the US and this key region.

Until the February 2004 gas crisis when Gazprom cut off all gas flows via Belarus, the issue of Belarus as a gas transit route was not addressed seriously despite this country's transiting around 20% of Russia's gas exports to Europe. The gas crisis threatened the reliability of gas supplies to Europe. It demonstrated the necessity of bringing Belarus back into focus, explaining how and why the seemingly amicable Russian-Belarussian relationship had deteriorated to such an extent, and suggesting how the problem might evolve in the future. This book shows that the reliability of the Belarussian gas transit routes is influenced by changes in the intensity of the Russian-Belarussian integration and explores whether Belarus is in a position to manage (or, indeed, survive) within the new, 'commercial' framework to which the gas issues had shifted following the failure to establish political union. The book predicts that the mainstay of Belarussian welfare is bound to deteriorate as Russia continues to increase its domestic gas prices at 20% annually as part of its energy strategy and in line with WTO requirements - thus, also making Belarus's independent stance vis-a-vis Gazprom unsustainable. In order to secure gas prices at the level of, at least, Russian domestic prices, Belarus is likely to return to negotiating a joint venture operating the Belarussian transit network together with Gazprom. Yet, even if such a joint venture were to be formed, it would not eliminate the main reason of the unreliability of gas transit via Belarus - the weakness of the national economy. Therefore, unless Belarus embarks on reforms leading to substantial gas conservation, it will continue to be tempted to resort to unauthorised gas off-takes and non-payments undermining the reliability of transit.

In his pathbreaking "Resource Wars," world security expert Michael Klare alerted us to the role of resources in conflicts in the post-cold-war world. Now, in "Blood and Oil," he concentrates on a single precious commodity, petroleum, while issuing a warning to the United States--its most powerful, and most dependent, global consumer.
Since September 11 and the commencement of the "war on terror," the world's attention has been focused on the relationship between U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and the oceans of crude oil that lie beneath the region's soil. Klare traces oil's impact on international affairs since World War II, revealing its influence on the Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, and Carter doctrines. He shows how America's own wells are drying up as our demand increases; by 2010 the United States will need to import 60 percent of its oil. And since most of this supply will have to come from chronically unstable, often violently anti-American zones--the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea, Latin America, and Africa--our dependency is bound to lead to recurrent military involvement.
With clarity and urgency, "Blood and Oil" delineates the United States' predicament and cautions that it is time to change our energy policies, before we spend the next decades paying for oil with blood.

Examines 'regionalism' - countries working together in small trade groups, instead of the 'free' market of globalisation Shows that regionalism is growing, as a result of the pressures of globalisation Multidisciplinary - ideal for students in economics, globalisation, geography and international studies Explores issues including security, money issues, identity and integration Case studies include Asia, Africa, Europe, the Americas and the Middle East This book explores the phenomenon of regionalism. It is a contradiction of globalisation that there is a growing tendency for countries to enter into regional arrangements as a response to the pressures of operating in a global marketplace. The contributors explore how this pattern impacts on wider issues such as global governance, democracy, identity and trade. The book reviews the major theoretical approaches to regional cooperation including perspectives from international relations, political economy, economics and sociology. regionalism; issues of regional cooperation (such as security, monetary issues, identity and integration); and an exploration of specific case studies including the Middle East, Africa, the Americas, China, Europe, Asia and the Pacific. With a range of leading contributors, including Bjorn Hettne, Louise Fawcett and David Francis, this is an in-depth guide to the subject that will be of interest to students across the social sciences.