“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…