I teach a ‘summer intensive’ graduate course in Trade Research Methods at the University of Adelaide. In five days we cover everything from the role of evidence in public policy to how to write a report that your boss will read (and even understand). Most of my students have no formal training in statistics (or [...]
Richard Baldwin, whose writing I like and whose scholarship I respect, thinks so. But I disagree for reasons I spell out (after summarizing RB’s argument) in my paper that you can download here In brief: if we could really do what needs to be done in a WTO 2.0, then we wouldn’t need WTO 2.0 [...]
I can see why people say it’s too long. There is a heap of stuff that COULD have been cut if the target were a 90 — 120 minute movie. But I knew it was almost three hours when I bought the tickets so… Anway I’m a big fan of Wagner opera and you ain’t [...]
India remains a mystery to me. I spent two weeks in southern India in January, in Chennai and Kerala. It was the first time I had visited any part of the country although, in the past decade I’ve spent some time in all of the states that border India bar Nepal. I expected to find [...]
It would be madness for Australia to agree to admit Canada to the TPP “free trade” negotiations on the basis that they might keep their astronomically high barriers to some food imports. The Canadian Trade Minister, Ed Fast, told reporters this week that he believes Canada has “public support” from six of the nine countries [...]
Alan Beattie’s new booklet “Who’s in Charge Here” (Amazon) is an amusing, accurate, accessible account of the current mess in global financial and trade “governance.” Well worth the $3 price. But he draws a “lesson” from his little history of the crises of 2008–2011 that I find un-satisfying. Who’s in Charge Here is a valuable [...]
Is there any point in continuing to puzzle over trade policy and agreements? Do they really make any difference to anything? It seems they’ve become too hard to put together; but does that matter? Since about 2001, I’ve been writing a weblog analysing international trade agreements, national trade policies and the post-WWII “system” of government [...]
The US National Foreign Trade Council has released a short paper (PDF file) endorsing a “critical mass” (CM) approach to new WTO-associated trade agreements, without, however, producing any new ideas on how to accomplish this in the current multilateral trade framework. A top U.S. business group, frustrated with years of stalemate in world trade talks, [...]
His Telstra term has apparently left Ziggy Switkowski with a taste for Gaullist illogic. He reckons that the absence of a rationale — other than rent-seeking — is not fatal to a policy that supports a “diverse” industrial patrimoine. It is very hard to make a conventional business case for subsidisation of (or, more fashionably, [...]
Robert Fisk’s unsentimental analysis of Assad’s strengths As long as Syria can trade with Iraq, it can trade with Iran and, of course, it can trade with Lebanon. The Shia of Iran and the Shia majority in Iraq and the Shia leadership (though not majority) in Syria and the Shia (the largest community, but not [...]