Investment Policies in the GATT

Host country policies toward inward direct investment can have predictable effects on trade flows. Trade related investment measures' (TRIMs) such as local-content requirements and minimum-export requirements have recently come under official scrutiny in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. This paper examines the economic and political context of the Uruguay Round negotiations on TRIMs. In the negotiations, investment measures have been treated as a particular instance of a broader problem: the proliferation of nontariff trade distortions. As with other trade distortions, the negotiating strategy has been to identify specific policies to be proscribed or limited. However, this approach ignores the typical interactions between multinational firms and host governments. Observed investment regimes are often the result of a lengthy and complex bargaining process. While some investment regimes actually alter the allocation of resources in production and trade, others affect mainly the distribution of rents between firms and host countries. In particular, the trade impact, if any, depends as much on economic conditions as on the specific combination of investment measures imposed.

The Challenge to U.S. Leadership in High-Technology Industries (Can the United States Maintain Its Lead? Should It Try?)

The United States emerged from World War II as the acknowledged global leader in basic science and its industrial application. While U.S. science has been able to maintain that preeminence in most areas, the nation's technological lead has met increasingly formidable challenges from abroad. Although the evidence on recent U.S. performance is mixed, other nations, and especially Japan, have clearly gained ground in high-technology production and trade. The future of U.S. high-technology production has thus emerged as a major focus of public policy. This paper reviews the recent performance of U.S. high-techology industries, examines possible motives underlying government policies to promote high-technology production, and offers some guidelines for evaluating the outcomes of alternative policy regimes.

International Competition in Services

Production of services now dominates economic activity in the United States and most other nations. It is thus natural to find increasing attention on the part of U.S. policymakers to international competition in service activities. Yielding to strong pressure from the United States, members of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) agreed in September 1986 to include services in the new "Uruguay Round" of multilateral trade negotiations. But there remains widespread skepticism regarding the prospects for these negotiations. This paper surveys the main issues and evidence relating to U.S. international competition in services. It reviews the forces that have catapulted services to the top of the agenda for the new GATT round; the conceptual issues raised by international competition in services; the growing importance of services in U.S. production and in international transactions; the relationship of services growth to "deindustrialization" of the U.S. economy; the nature and motivation of barriers to international competition in services and their relationship to nontariff distortions of merchandise trade; and the choices awaiting U.S. officials in forthcoming bilateral and multilateral negotiations.

The International Trading System and Its Future

This chapter describes the evolution and structure of the international trading system, focusing on the tension between the fundamental GATT/WTO principle of most-favored-nation (MFN) treatment and the proliferation of discriminatory trading arrangements, including regional agreements as well as new versions of special and differential treatment of low-income countries. It also discusses the increasing pressure to use the enforcement power of the GATT/WTO system to achieve member compliance with social norms in the areas of labor and environment. The chapter concludes by considering some significant challenges that currently face the international trading system and possible directions of the system’s evolution in response to these challenges.

U.S. Trade Policy and the Adjustment Process

This paper focuses on the adjustment environment in the United States as set out by the active U.S. trade remedy laws (antidumping, countervailing duties, and safeguards) and the Trade Adjustment Assistance program. We document U.S. industries' use of these various laws and relate industry use of trade policies to import competition and revealed comparative advantage. We also examine potential effects of U.S. trade policies on adjustment to shifting comparative advantage and give examples of industry outcomes. An important conclusion is that trade policies delaying industry adjustment can promote new entry into the domestic industry and thereby increase rather than alleviate the pressure on existing plants and workers. Copyright 2005, International Monetary Fund

U.S.-Japan and U.S.-China trade conflict : export growth, reciprocity, and the international trading system

First Japan and more recently China have pursued export-oriented growth strategies. While other Asian countries have done likewise, Japan and China are of particular interest because their economies are so large and the size of the associated bilateral trade imbalances with the United States so conspicuous. In this paper the authors focus on U.S. efforts to restore the reciprocal GATT/WTO market-access bargain in the face of such large imbalances and the significant spillovers to the international trading system. The paper highlights similarities and differences in the two cases. The authors describe U.S. attempts to reduce the bilateral imbalances through targeted trade policies intended to slow growth of U.S. imports from these countries or increase growth of U.S. exports to them. They then examine how these trade policy responses, as well as U.S. efforts to address what were perceived as underlying causes of the imbalances, influenced the evolution of the international trading system. Finally, the authors compare the macroeconomic conditions associated with the bilateral trade imbalances and their implications for the conclusions of the two episodes.Free Trade,Trade Law,Economic Theory&Research,Trade Policy,Currencies and Exchange Rates

United States-Japan Economic Relations

The bilateral relationship with Japan now dominates American thinking on the benefits and costs of foreign trade. This paper reevaluates the past and future course of U.S.-Japan economic relations. It identifies six distinct aspects of the relationship that may underlie the continuing friction: bilateral imbalance on merchandise trade, capital flows from Japan to the United States, the yen/dollar exchange rate, sectoral trade distortions, Japan's technological catch-up, and societal differences. For each source of conflict, the main causes and potential remedies are assessed. Several important conclusions emerge from the analysis. First, although the bilateral trade and capital-account imbalances were produced primarily by macroeconomic factors and can therefore be viewed as "temporary" rather than long-term developments, elimination of the imbalances without serious damage may be difficult to achieve. In terms of sectoral adjustments, the U.S.-Japan relationship is entering a new phase as the two nations grow more similar in terms of technology base, abundance of capital and skilled labor, and per capita income. Two-way trade in technology and in technology-based services will become increasingly important, while both nations will cope with similar problems of adjustment to pressure from a new tier of competitors in Asia and elsewhere. As the aggregate imbalances diminish, sectoral trade conflict will be concentrated on the two ends of the technology spectrum, with issues raised both by conflicting approaches to the phasing out of uncompetitive industries and by the nurturing of new technology-based industries.