Some Fairly Recent Must- and Should-Reads About Globalization
- Ken Schultz: "I’m not an IPE expert, but it seems like you must be doing tariffs wrong if they aren’t even supported by the labor union in the protected industry..."
Paul Krugman: Oh, What a Stupid Trade War: "Even if tariffs were expansionary, that would just make the Fed raise rates faster, which would in turn crowd out jobs in other industries...
Gabrielle Coppola: Trump’s TPP Pullout May Have Cost Missouri Its Harley Factory: "Harley-Davidson Inc.’s chief executive officer said he may have kept a plant open in Missouri if the U.S. had stayed in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the free-trade agreement that President Donald Trump withdrew from last year...
The Brexiters never had a plan for what they would do if they won the referendum. And they still do not have a plan. I do not see a road other than "transitional" arrangements that keep things as they are without the UK having any voice in Brussels—"transitional" arrangements that will keep getting indefinitely extended: Robert Hutton: Stuck In the Middle: These Are Theresa May's Four Brexit Options: "Her inner Brexit Cabinet has rejected her proposed customs relationship with the European Union...
Some very interesting thoughts from Ken Rogoff. But he does not seem to recognize that Shenzhen is now at least as much a global hub of hardware and manufacturing process innovation in small-scale high-tech devices as anywhere else in the world. World class communities of engineering practice are hard to build. But China looks to be building one. I would dearly love somebody to take a deep close look at Shenzhen and tell me to what extent it is already more than just "the great assembler": Ken Rogoff: Will China Really Supplant US Economic Hegemony?: "Over the next 100 years, who takes over, Chinese workers or the robots?...
If the U.S. wants to avoid a very damaging outcome to all this, the less immoderate Republicans and the Democrats need to be thinking hard about how to take power away from Donald Trump on trade matters—and national security matters—come January 5, 2019: Martin Wolf: Donald Trump declares trade war on China: "The Trump administration has presented China with an ultimatum on trade...
National Taxpayers Union: More Than 1,100 Economists Join NTU to Voice Opposition to Tariffs, Protectionism: "The lowering of trade barriers between nations has been one of the great achievements of the global economic system in the postwar era...
Eight years of Governor Sam Brownback has seen Kansas lose 8% of its jobs relative to the national average. Now Kansas is Ground Zero for Trump's trade war. Joshua Green: Chinese Sorghum Tariffs Will Hit Hard in Trump-friendly Kansas: "Trump’s Trade War Hits Another Red State: What’s the matter with Kansas? It’ll be hardest hit by new Chinese tariffs...
Alessandro Nicita, Marcelo Olarreaga, and Peri da Silva: [A trade war will increase average tariffs by 32 percentage points(https://voxeu.org/article/trade-war-will-increase-average-tariffs-32-percentage-points): "A trade war will increase average tariffs by 32 percentage points...
"If getting China to pay what it owes for technology were the goal, you’d expect the U.S.... to make specific demands... and... build a coalition", a Tran-Pacific Partnership, so to speak: Paul Krugman: The Art of the Flail: "Whenever investors suspect that Donald Trump will really go through with his threats of big tariff increases... stocks plunge...
Imposing tariffs on intermediate inputs is especially bad, especially destructive: Chad Brown: The Element of Surprise Is a Bad Strategy for a Trade War: "Trump’s decision to impose restrictions on intermediate inputs and capital equipment is a step backward...
@#$#@!*&%%!! Ana Swanson: Trump Proposes Rejoining Trans-Pacific Partnership to Shield Farmers From Trade War: "President Trump... [said] he was directing his advisers to look into rejoining the multicountry trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership...
Jesse K. Anttila-Hughes et al.: Mortality from Nestlé's Marketing of Infant Formula in Low and Middle-Income Countries: "Intensive and controversial marketing of infant formula is believed to be responsible for millions of infant deaths in low and middle-income countries (LMICs)...
Paul Krugman: Trade Wars, Stranded Assets, and the Stock Market: "Even a trade war that drastically rolled back globalization wouldn’t impose costs on the economy comparable to the kinds of movement we’ve seen in stock prices...
Martin Wolf: The Chinese economy is rebalancing, at last: "Consumption is at last becoming the most important driver of demand in the Chinese economy...
Martin Wolf: How China can avoid a trade war with the US: "The objectives of these US actions are unclear... to halt alleged misbehaviour... or, as the labelling of China as a “strategic competitor” suggests, is it to halt China’s technological progress altogether—an aim that is unachievable and certainly non-negotiable...
Paul Krugman: Globalization: What Did We Miss?: "Anyone who worked on the political economy of trade policy knew that fights over tariffs look very much as if they come out of a specific-factors world...
Robert Feenstra, Hong Ma, Akira Sasahara, and Yuan Xu: Reconsidering the ‘China shock’ in trade: "While previous studies focus on the job-reducing effect of the surging imports from China or other low-wage countries on US employment...
Highlighted: Globalization: What Did Paul Krugman Miss?
Shawn Donnan: Trump is about to launch a trade war with no way out: "Business chiefs have pleaded for the Trump administration not to impose tariffs on electronics, shoes and other imports from China that go far beyond the steel and aluminium he has already targeted...
Lant Pritchett: Alleviating Global Poverty: Labor Mobility, Direct Assistance, and Economic Growth
Wakanda and the Resource Curse: "Wakanda’s prosperity is based on its possession of vibranium, a stable transuranic elements with unique and extraordinary chemical properties..."
J. Vernon Henderson, Adam Storeygard, Tim L. Squires, and David N. Weil: The Global Spatial Distribution of Economic Activity: Nature, History, and the Role of Trade: "We study the distribution of economic activity, as proxied by lights at night, across 250,000 grid cells of average area 560 square kilometers...
Martin Feldstein: The Real Reason for Trump’s Steel and Aluminum Tariffs: "The US tariffs will... increase the likelihood that China will accelerate the reduction in subsidized excess capacity...
Ernest Liu (2016): INDUSTRIAL POLICIES IN PRODUCTION NETWORKS: "Many developing countries adopt industrial policies that push resources towards selected economic sectors...
Dani Rodrik: Trump’s Trade Gimmickry: "The imbalances and inequities generated by the global economy cannot be tackled by protecting a few politically well-connected industries, using manifestly ridiculous national security considerations as an excuse...
Paul Krugman: "This might be a good time to talk about the arithmetic of trade and manufacturing... why even a full-on trade war can't restore the manufacturing-centered economy Trump wants back...
Vachel Lindsay: The Congo: A Study of the Negro Race "Listen to the yell of Leopold's ghost...
Simon Wren-Lewis: Labour's embrace of a customs union could end the Brexit fantasy: "The UK was always going to stay in a customs union with the EU the moment that the EU put the Irish border as one of the three items to be settled at the first stage..
Zachary Torrey: TPP 2.0: The Deal Without the US: "What’s new about the CPTPP and what do the changes mean?...
Bishnupriya Gupta: Falling Behind and Catching up: India’s Transition from a Colonial Economy: "India fell behind during colonial rule...
Dani Rodrik: What Does a True Populism Look Like? It Looks Like the New Deal: "When populism succeeds, it does so not by cosmetic gimmicks but by going after the roots of economic injustice directly...
Daniel Thomas: London life proves hard to give up for Brexit relocations: "Brexit.... Some of the most important conversations were... but in the kitchens and living rooms of those learning their fates in the first wave of company relocations...
Doug Campbell: Relative Prices, Hysteresis, and the Decline of American Manufacturing: "This study uses new measures of real exchange rates to study the collapse of US manufacturing employment in the early 2000s in historical and international perspective...
Martin Wolf: Brexit has replaced the UK’s stiff upper lip with quivering rage: "In part, the UK is victim of its past successes...
Oleg Itskhoki and Dmitry Mukhin: Exchange Rate Disconnect in General Eqilibrium: "We propose a dynamic general equilibrium model of exchange rate determination...
Susan Houseman: Understanding the [Post-2000] Decline in Manufacturing Employment: "How did so many people erroneously point to automation as the culprit? It was, Houseman said...
Jeffrey Frankel: Does Trade Fuel Inequality?
