Shifts in U.S. Merchandise Trade, 2008

[Excerpt] The annual Shifts in U.S. Merchandise Trade report is prepared on the basis of more than 250 major industry/ commodity groups and subgroups identified by the U.S. International Trade Commission (the Commission). The report contains the analysis of international trade analysts of the Commission’s Office of Industries, who routinely monitor trade developments in all natural resource, agricultural, and manufacturing industries. The report is divided into three parts. Part I presents an analysis of U.S. merchandise trade in 10 merchandise sectors and overall economic performance from 2007 to 2008. U.S. merchandise trade performance in 2008 is summarized and compared with such performance in 2007. Coverage of the individual merchandise sectors includes data showing U.S. export, import, and trade balance shifts by sectors, industry/commodity groups (and in some cases subgroups), and shifts in trade with U.S. trade partners. Major shifts in trade are highlighted and examined in greater detail in the rest of the report. Part I also examines U.S. imports from trade partners eligible for U.S. trade preference programs, most notably imports from beneficiaries of the African Growth and Opportunity Act, the Andean Trade Preference Act, the Caribbean Basin Initiative, and the Generalized System of Preferences. Part II examines the shifts in U.S. trade with each of the top five U.S. trade partners - Canada, China, the EU, Japan, and Mexico. Also examined are shifts in trade with Brazil, India, and Russia—U.S. trading partners that are growing in significance. Summary tables show the important shifts in U.S. bilateral trade and highlight leading changes in industry/commodity groups for each of the major trade partners. Part III presents a general overview for each of the 10 merchandise sectors, identifying significant shifts in trade within each sector. Each sector chapter includes a statistical summary table of industry/commodity groups or subgroups, showing absolute and percent changes in bilateral trade in a year-to-year comparison of 2007 and 2008. In addition to the sectoral analyses, shifts in 20 specific industry/commodity groups are examined in greater detail. These industry/commodity groups were selected based on absolute and percentage shifts in trade; such shifts must have exceeded $1.0 billion and 50 percent

The Economic Effects of Significant U.S. Import Restraints

[Excerpt] This is the seventh update of The Economic Effects of Significant U.S. Import Restraints. Since the first of these studies was published nearly 20 years ago, U.S. tariff rates have fallen, nontariff measures on imports have been removed, and trade has expanded markedly. This period has also seen increasing U.S. integration into global supply chains, the subject of a special topic in this report. The United States is one of the world’s most open economies. In 2010, the average U.S. tariff on all goods remained near its historic low of 1.3 percent, on an import-weighted basis, essentially unchanged from the previous update in 2009. Nonetheless, significant restraints on trade remain in certain sectors. The U.S. International Trade Commission (Commission) estimates that U.S. economic welfare, as defined by total public and private consumption, would increase by about $2.6 billion annually by 2015 if the United States unilaterally ended (“liberalized”) all significant restraints quantified in this report. Exports would expand by$9.0 billion and imports by $11.5 billion. These changes would result from removing import barriers in the following sectors: sugar, ethanol, canned tuna, dairy products, tobacco, textiles and apparel, and other high-tariff manufacturing sectors. As in previous updates, the simulations presented in this report measure the effects of unilateral liberalization of U.S. import restraints (i.e., the simulations assume that U.S. trading partners do not engage in any reciprocal liberalization). However, the effects on the U.S. economy can differ significantly when both the United States and its trading partners engage in reciprocal liberalization

The Year in Trade 2008: Operation of the Trade Agreements Program

[Excerpt] This report is the 60th in a series of annual reports submitted to the U.S. Congress under section 163(c) of the Trade Act of 1974 (19 U.S.C. 2213(c)) and its predecessor legislation. Section 163(c) of the Trade Act of 1974 states that “the International Trade Commission shall submit to the Congress at least once a year, a factual report on the operation of the trade agreements program.” This report is one of the principal means by which the U.S. International Trade Commission provides Congress with factual information on trade policy and its administration for calendar year 2008. The trade agreements program includes “all activities consisting of, or related to, the administration of international agreements which primarily concern trade and which are concluded pursuant to the authority vested in the President by the Constitution” and congressional legislation

Recent Trends in U.S. Services Trade: 2009 Annual Report

Recent Trends in U.S. Services Trade, 2009 Annual Report focuses principally on professional services (advertising, education, healthcare, and legal services), which provide critical inputs to various goods and service industries, as well as specialized services directly to individual consumers. The largest professional service firms in terms of revenue are located in developed countries and offer their services across the globe through both cross-border trade and affiliate transactions. The markets of many developing countries are growing rapidly and offer larger professional service firms significant merger, acquisition, and investment opportunities. U.S. services overall, and professional services in particular, grew faster in 2007 in terms of contribution to gross domestic product, employment, and cross-border exports than the average annual rate of the preceding five-year period. Services supplied to foreign consumers by foreign-based affiliates of U.S. firms, including those in professional services, also experienced recent strong growth

Technology and the North?South division of labour

SUMMARY Historically, too little attention has been paid to the impact of radical technical change on development strategies. In the current context of slow rates of economic growth, electronics based innovations are having a major impact on these strategies, particularly with respect to the international division of labour. The importance of considering dynamic technical change is illustrated by reference to the semiconductor industry where there appears to be a strong trend towards reducing the industry's dependence upon off?shore assembly in developing countries. RESUME La technologie et la division du travail Nord?Sud Jusqu'ici, peu se sont penchés sur l'incidence du progrès technique sur les stratégies du développement. Dans le cadre actuel d'une croissance économique ralentie, les innovations d'ordre électronique ont un fort impact sur ces stratégies, notamment sur la division du travail internationale. L'importance de l'étude de l'évolution technique est exemplifiée par le cas du secteur des semi?conducteurs, dans lequel les PVD souhaitent réduire leur dépendance á l'égard du montage extérieur. RESUMEN La tecnología y la división del trabajo entre el norte y el sur Desde el punto de vista histórico, apenas se ha prestado atención a las repercusiones de los cambios técnicos radicales en las estrategias del desarrollo. En el contexto actual de bajos índices de crecimiento económico, las innovaciones basadas en la electrónica están teniendo importantes consecuencias sobre estas estrategias, especialmente en relación con la división internacional del trabajo. Se ilustra la importancia de considerar el cambio técnico dinámico con referencia a la industria de semiconductores donde parece observarse una fuerte tendencia hacia la reducción de la dependencia de la industria en el montaje exterior en los países en vías de desarrollo

Small store presence in Japan

The determinants of the development of small store presence in Japan are investigated using a fixed effects multinomial logit market share model. Large stores tend to have higher market shares in shop-types with increasing shares in consumer expenditures, increasing inventory turnover, and increasing diversification, but do not seem to be able to profit from scale economies in labour use

The boomerang returns? Accounting for the impact of uncertainties on the dynamics of remanufacturing systems

Recent years have witnessed companies abandon traditional open-loop supply chain structures in favour of closed-loop variants, in a bid to mitigate environmental impacts and exploit economic opportunities. Central to the closed-loop paradigm is remanufacturing: the restoration of used products to useful life. While this operational model has huge potential to extend product life-cycles, the collection and recovery processes diminish the effectiveness of existing control mechanisms for open-loop systems. We systematically review the literature in the field of closed-loop supply chain dynamics, which explores the time-varying interactions of material and information flows in the different elements of remanufacturing supply chains. We supplement this with further reviews of what we call the three ‘pillars’ of such systems, i.e. forecasting, collection, and inventory and production control. This provides us with an interdisciplinary lens to investigate how a ‘boomerang’ effect (i.e. sale, consumption, and return processes) impacts on the behaviour of the closed-loop system and to understand how it can be controlled. To facilitate this, we contrast closed-loop supply chain dynamics research to the well-developed research in each pillar; explore how different disciplines have accommodated the supply, process, demand, and control uncertainties; and provide insights for future research on the dynamics of remanufacturing systems

International trade agreements and international migration

Despite large potential economic gains to the countries concerned, bilateral and multilateral negotiations regarding liberalization of migration have not had the high profile of trade negotiations and agreements. Migration and trade have been traditionally the prerogative of different ministries, yet there are many interdependencies between international trade, foreign investment and migration. The relevance of these interdependencies for trade negotiations has been remarkably ignored in the literature. In this paper we therefore focus on the two-way interaction between international migration and agreements designed to enhance cross-border trade or investment. Liberalization of international trade in services and the movement of people are likely to offer much more significant economic gains than liberalization of remaining barriers to goods trade. However, progress within multilateral frameworks is fraught with difficulty. Mode IV of GATS is restricted to temporary movement of service employees and has yielded little progress so far. Negotiations within more flexible unilateral and bilateral frameworks are likely to be more successful in liberalizing the movement of labour. We discuss several specific examples and conclude that trade negotiations are increasingly accommodating migration policies that favour temporary migration over permanent migration and that the migration regulatory framework is likely to be further linked to trade and investment over time

Some Bad News is Good News for Foreign Investors: The Case of Intellectual Property Rights Infringement in China

Despite China's attractiveness to foreign investors, intellectual property rights (IPR) protection in China has not caught up with international standards. This research aims to quantify the relationships between IPR violations, government effectiveness, and foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows in the context of China. Our econometric modeling and estimation based on provincial level data over 2002‐2012 show that in an early development stage of law and regulatory enforcement, the bad news of a rising number of IPR dispute cases signals the good news of an improvement in law and regulatory enforcement, which encourages IPR owners to raise legal cases. By contrast, in the later development stage, when law and regulatory enforcement has become much more effective, the bad news of a rising number of IPR disputes manifests itself as very bad news. Furthermore, this study confirms that FDI inflows enhance IPR protection through improving government effectiveness, and government effectiveness is one of the key factors promoting FDIs