World Trade & U.S. Jobs

[Excerpt] It has become obvious to everyone in and around the U.S. labor movement that our problems involve the global arena. Hundreds of thousands of trade unionists have seen their employers shut down plants and shift production overseas. Countless union negotiators have seen the boss play the foreign card at contract time: You have to give concessions to meet the foreign competition. U.S. trade unionists are a diverse lot, and they have come up with numerous interpretations of the international challenge. But, in practice, the primary way the U.S. labor movement has responded to the internationalization of labor relations has been to push for protective legislation against the unfair trading practices of foreign nations. This article takes a different tack. While it is true that unfair trading practices have deepened America\u27s economic problems, our trade deficit is itself a symptom of a deeper problem — global economic stagnation — that afflicts not only American workers but workers all around the world. The world economic situation now resembles that of the 1930s, when farmers dumped surplus food on the highways and factories lay idle because ordinary working Americans could not afford to buy what they produced. Today this crisis of underconsumption has returned — but on a global scale. As long as the world\u27s workers can\u27t afford to buy what they produce, competition for markets will remain feverish, trade wars will spur demands for protectionism, and workers will continue to find themselves under severe pressure to restrain their wage demands. The restoration of fair trade is desirable, but in itself it is no solution to the fundamental crisis of underconsumption caused by workers\u27 lagging spending power

Ecological analysis of world trade

Ecological systems have a high level of complexity combined with stability and rich biodiversity. Recently, the analysis of their properties and evolution has been pushed forward on a basis of concept of mutualistic networks that provides a detailed understanding of their features being linked to a high nestedness of these networks. It was shown that the nestedness architecture of mutualistic networks of plants and their pollinators minimizes competition and increases biodiversity. Here, using the United Nations COMTRADE database for years 1962 - 2009, we show that a similar ecological analysis gives a valuable description of the world trade. In fact the countries and trade products are analogous to plants and pollinators, and the whole trade network is characterized by a low nestedness temperature which is typical for the ecological networks. This approach provides new mutualistic features of the world trade highlighting new significance of countries and trade products for the world trade.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figures (6 extra figures in Supporting Information

The Transformation of World Trade

This Article contests the traditional view of the evolution of the world trade system. Rather than a unidirectional process of legalization focused exclusively on the system\u27s normative structure, Part I of the Article, The Explosion of the GATT Club, recounts the transformation from GATT to WTO as a bidirectional interaction between law and politics; in particular, between the system\u27s legal-normative structure and its political, decision making branch Part II of this Article, The Threat of a WTO Fortress, challenges the view that a choice must be made between politics and law or, put differently, between, on the one hand, democratic representation, participation, contestation, and the inherent flexibility that comes with it and, on the other hand, discipline, pre-commitment, and some degree of government by experts or export driven interests shielded from capture and popular ignorance. On the contrary, my claim is that a legitimate and efficient trading system requires both politics and law, or more particularly, appropriate balances between participation and discipline, flexibility and pre-commitment, accountability and insulation, popular support and expertise, and input and output legitimacy

The World Trade Network

      This paper uses the tools of network analysis and graph theory to graphically and analytically represent the characteristics of world trade. The structure of the World Trade Network is compared over time, detecting and interpreting patterns of trade ties among countries. In particular, we assess whether the entrance of a number of new important players into the world trading system in recent years has changed the main characteristics of the existing structure of world trade, or whether the existing network was simply extended to a new group of countries. We also analyze whether the observed changes in international trade flow patterns are related to the multilateral or the regional liberalization policies. The results show that trade integration at the world level has been increasing but it is still far from being complete, with the exception of some areas, that there is a strong heterogeneity in the countries’ choice of partners, and that the WTO plays an important role in trade integration. The role of the extensive and the intensive margin of trade is also highlighted.Network analysis,International Trade,WTO,Extensive and Intensive Margins of Trade,Gravity

World Trade at Risk

C. Fred Bergsten The decision by the House of Representatives on April 10 to change the rules for Congressional action on trade agreements drives a gaping hole in US trade policy and poses the gravest threat to the global trading system in decades. By rejecting long-settled procedures that prevented Congressional sidetracking of trade deals agreed by fully authorized Presidents, it instantaneously destroyed the credibility of the United States as a negotiating partner in the eyes of the rest of the world. Unless reversed soon, the House action will severely damage both the US economy and US foreign policy. It will particularly undermine the presumed goal of any new Administration in 2009 to restore our country's standing as a reliable partner in a cooperative multilateral world. It would help if Congress and the present Administration could pick up the pieces and pass the Colombia agreement, and the pending South Korea and Panama agreements as well. But the fundamental problem of US international credibility on trade will remain until a foolproof Trade Promotion Authority, or some equivalent successor, is renewed and indeed ensconced permanently. This can only be done, probably by the next Administration, as part of a "grand bargain" that recognizes the costs of liberalization and thus includes a major expansion of governmental assistance to workers dislocated by trade and perhaps other sources of dynamic change in our economy. In the absence of such a renewed foundation for an open and active US trade policy, both our economy and our foreign policy will suffer severely.

CAP reform and world trade negotiations

In March 1999 the European Council in Berlin agreed on reforms to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Dr Joseph McMahon of the Queen’s University of Belfast examines these reforms in relation to the European Community’s Agenda 2000 proposals and the next round of WTO negotiations and argues that they may not go far enough. Article by Dr Joseph A. McMahon published in Amicus Curiae - Journal of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and its Society for Advanced Legal Studies. The Journal is produced by the Society for Advanced Legal Studies at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London

Structure and Response in the World Trade Network

We examine how the structure of the world trade network has been shaped by globalization and recessions over the last 40 years. We show that by treating the world trade network as an evolving system, theory predicts the trade network is more sensitive to evolutionary shocks and recovers more slowly from them now than it did 40 years ago, due to structural changes in the world trade network induced by globalization. We also show that recession-induced change to the world trade network leads to an \emph{increased} hierarchical structure of the global trade network for a few years after the recession.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. Let