“Power-Based” Bargaining Over Trade: What Has Been the Economic Cost?
The U.S.-China trade war represents a natural experiment in the sense that we have not seen such wide-ranging increases in tariffs since the 1930s, when Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (Bown and Zhang, 2019). Not surprisingly, applied trade economists…
“Power-Based” Bargaining Over Trade: Myopic Behavior by the United States?
Analysis of the current administration’s trade policy choices has typically interpreted them in terms of a zero-sum game, i.e., rather than generating mutual benefits in a positive-sum game, international trade is a game where economically, one country is a winner…
China’s Agricultural Import Commitments: Inefficient “Managed” Trade?
In light of the sectors targeted by China’s retaliatory tariffs against U.S. imports, it is not surprising that agriculture was a critical component of the Phase One Trade Agreement between the U.S. and China, that went into effect on February…
The U.S.-China trade war: why not go back to the WTO?
Last week, bilateral trade talks in Washington D.C. ended with China inviting the U.S. to send a negotiating team to Beijing this month (The Guardian, January 31, 2019). The headline news from the talks was that the Chinese delegation offered…
What does “reciprocity” in trade negotiations actually mean?
Among several issues raised by the Administration’s unfolding approach to trade policy, one really caught my eye last week when Representative Sean P. Duffy of Wisconsin proposed granting the President new executive powers to raise tariffs on U.S. imports, stating…
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