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Kate Wandsnider — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 20:59:28 +0000

The China trade shock of the 1990s and 2000s is widely blamed for hollowing out the US manufacturing sector. But anyone who thinks that unwinding trade with China will not result in price increases and significant political backlash is in for a rude awakening.

It is hard to think of an issue that brings together the United States’ deeply divided political class more than the need to contain China’s growing influence, whether through trade restrictions, tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles (EVs), or banning TikTok. But while the national-security argument for such protectionist measures is undeniably compelling, it is unclear whether US political leaders and the American public are prepared for the potential economic fallout.

The prevailing belief among policymakers is that the surge of Chinese imports into the US market during the 2000s hollowed out America’s manufacturing base, making the kind of rapid military build-up that enabled the Allies to win World War II all but impossible. In US policy circles, the “China Shock” is often portrayed as a massive error that devastated towns across the Rust Belt and led to a sharp increase in inequality.

Consequently, there is widespread agreement among policymakers and commentators that the US must prevent a “China Shock 2.0” by imposing massive tariffs and trade restrictions on Chinese technologies such as cell phones, drones, and, crucially, EVs, solar panels, and green-energy equipment. President Joe Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee in November’s presidential election, disagree on most issues. When it comes to dealing with China, however, both appear to be competing for the title of America’s most protectionist president.

But the China Shock narrative that underpins current US trade policy is deeply flawed. While competition with Chinese producers has adversely affected some manufacturing jobs, free trade has undoubtedly created more winners than losers. Moreover, low-income US consumers have been among the biggest beneficiaries of low-cost Chinese imports. Policymakers who believe that unwinding trade with China will not result in price increases and significant political backlash are in for a rude awakening.

To be sure, the economic impact of US trade restrictions could be minimized by rerouting Chinese imports through third-country suppliers, enabling Americans to buy Chinese-made solar panels as though they were produced in India, albeit at a higher price. But while this tariff theater may be popular with voters, it is hard to see how this would improve national security any more than rerouting Chinese fentanyl into the US through Mexico helped solve the opioid crisis.

Moreover, it would take years for “friendlier” countries to develop their own manufacturing bases that can compete with China’s, especially bodog sportsbook review at the low prices offered by Chinese producers. In some sectors like EVs, China’s production capacity has given it an almost insurmountable lead over Western countries. Given this reality, the United Auto Workers’ goal of having Americans buy electric cars produced in high-wage, unionized US facilities will be extremely difficult to achieve, no matter how much Biden or Trump may support it.

A more targeted approach would ideally distinguish between trade involving sensitive military technologies and other goods, but doing so is more complicated than many seem to realize. The convergence of military and civilian technologies has become painfully apparent during the Russia-Ukraine war, with low-cost drones originally designed for carrying packages being repurposed as bombers and private mobile networks playing a pivotal role in major battles. Additionally, as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown, the US and its allies depend on Chinese medical supplies.

For those of us who believe that multilateral cooperation is necessary to address the world’s most pressing problems, from climate change to regulating artificial intelligence, the escalating rivalry between the world’s two major powers is deeply troubling. From the US perspective, China’s authoritarian government undermines the foundational liberal values that underpin the global economic and political order. China’s relentless cyberattacks continue to pose an immediate threat to the US economy and American companies, and a potential Chinese blockade or invasion of Taiwan would have far-reaching global consequences.

From China’s perspective, the US and its allies are cynically trying to maintain a world order established through centuries of European and American imperialism. Much to the chagrin of US diplomats, many other countries appear to share this sentiment, as evidenced by the widespread disregard among developing and emerging economies for Western sanctions against Russia.

Some may hope that China’s economic slowdown will curb its geopolitical ambitions. But its ongoing difficulties are just as likely to push China toward a confrontation with the US as they are to foster cooperation.

Nevertheless, despite what many in the US may think, economic decoupling is not a viable option. Although the Biden administration’s trade restrictions and bellicose rhetoric are a response to Chinese provocations, both countries must find a way to compromise if they want to achieve stable, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth.

Kenneth Rogoff is a professor of economics and public policy at Harvard University and recipient of the 2011 Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics

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Bhuvana Bharadwaj — Fri, 16 Sep 2022 16:05:00 +0000

What began as a trade war over China’s unfair economic policies has now evolved into a so-called cold war propelled by differing ideologies. U.S.-China bilateral relations took a nosedive in 2018 when then U.S. president Donald Trump’s obsession with trade deficits led him to impose punitive tariffs on China. The tariffs were followed by restrictions on both China’s access to high-tech U.S. products and foreign investments involving security concerns and by allegations of unfair Chinese commercial practices.

Despite pleas from the U.S. business community to ease tensions, U.S. President Joe Biden so far has amplified his predecessor’s policies by strengthening anti-China alliances and implementing additional sanctions. Biden now characterizes the U.S.-China conflict as “a battle between the utility of democracies in the twenty-first century and autocracies.”

But the logic underpinning the U.S. trade war was flawed, and the more recent, politically driven restrictions are counterproductive given the damaging long-term economic consequences for both sides. Nonetheless, there have been few signs to date that Biden is likely to change course. In the meantime, then, Europeans may be in a better position for productive give-and-take discussions with China on economic policymaking.

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The Trump administration’s initial mistake in launching a trade war was to assume that U.S. trade deficits—which occur when a country imports more than it exports—were inherently bad and that China was to blame.

However, trade deficits are not a good indicator of the state of the economy, and U.S. trade balances largely are driven by soaring U.S. federal budget deficits, which have little to do with China. The irony is that three years after Trump’s tariffs were initiated to fix the U.S. trade deficit, bilateral trade between the United States and China has now rebounded to all-time highs, China’s trade surplus has increased, and the U.S. deficit has gotten worse.

Trump also echoed popular but misguided sentiments that U.S. firms had been overinvesting in China, resulting in a loss in competitiveness. But over the past two decades, only 1–2 percent of annual U.S. foreign investment has gone to China. By contrast, the EU, which is comparable to the United States in its economic size, has invested roughly twice as much as the United States has annually. The concern should be why the United States invests so little in China rather than so much.

China’s Intellectual Property Safeguards

China’s alleged failure to protect intellectual property rights is also mischaracterized. At the extreme, China is accused of stealing foreign intellectual property, especially technology. But after accounting for the size of China’s foreign transactions and research activities, such events may not occur unusually often or are possibly exaggerated.

Further, China’s patent courts have matured in dealing with this problem—foreign plaintiffs are now more likely to win their cases than domestic firms. In addition, theft is becoming less of a concern as payments for royalties and licenses by Chinese firms, according to one think tank scholar, have grown almost by a factor of four in the past ten years, making China the second-largest payer of such royalties globally.

The reality is that it takes generations to develop a sound regime for intellectual property rights, as was the case for the United States. The foundation of China’s system was laid only two decades ago with reforms that accompanied China’s 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization. Progress Bodog Poker has been notable in recent years as evidenced by the findings of the “2020 Business Climate Survey” by the American Chamber of Commerce in China; the survey indicated that nearly 70 percent of surveyed U.S. firms in China felt that China’s enforcement of intellectual property rights had improved, compared with only 47 percent in 2015.

China’s Protectionist Policies

But there are also credible concerns that China’s investment policies treat foreign firms unfairly. One complaint is China’s use of subsidies. All countries provide subsidies to domestic companies and households, such as U.S. support to farmers, tax deductions to households to encourage clean energy use, and incentives to companies like Amazon to relocate. But in China, subsidies tend to be more focused on using the country’s banks and equity markets to support high-tech firms and strategic industries.

The U.S. government could choose to pressure China to better align its subsidy policies with Western norms, but instead, the Biden administration is copying China’s playbook by proposing its own subsidies to promote strategic industries.

China’s protectionist tendencies are also evident from the requirement that foreign firms form joint ventures with domestic Chinese firms as a condition for market entry in some economic sectors. This stipulation has been widely cited as a means of promoting so-called forced technology transfer, where foreign firms pass new technology on to their Chinese partners as a condition for being able to invest and produce in China.

But these Chinese requirements, too, have seemed to get less stringent in recent years, as exemplified by major foreign investments in chemical manufacturing (BASF), auto manufacturing (Tesla), and finance (BlackRock). These foreign companies have been allowed for the first time to enter key sectors without a Chinese partner.

China’s willingness to drop the joint venture requirement featured prominently in the EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment negotiated in December 2020 (which has not yet been ratified). This experience suggests that policy differences can be addressed through consultations if both sides are willing to compromise.

Building Better Bilateral Relations

The key to more harmonious economic relations is recognizing that a more developed China need not threaten the well-being of the West. The United States, Europe, and China have different comparative advantages, which are reflected in the composition of their exports. Europe specializes in high-end consumer goods and machinery; the United States in agricultural products, high-tech components, and services; and China in basic manufactured consumer goods and inputs. All sides can continue to prosper by operating under a rules-based international trading system.

U.S.-China tensions, however, are now being driven less by economic realities and more by great power rivalry and nationalism—factors exacerbated by mutual mistrust over each other’s strategic intentions. In describing the United States’ multifaceted relationship with China, the Biden administration has emphasized the need to “compete, confront, and cooperate” all at the same time. But as Chinese President Xi Jinping stressed at the 2021 World Economic Forum, “competition is for pursuing excellence—not killing off a rival.”

Punitive trade measures have had little effect in terms of altering economic outcomes, and the experiences of countries worldwide show that sanctions generally do little to get governments to change their core beliefs. Instead, there is more to be gained from leveraging China’s dependence on a rules-based international trading system as the country seeks to become a more prosperous and modern nation.

Practical Steps Forward

The challenge now is to move away from a self-defeating cold war by working within the international economic system to arbitrate and moderate tensions. The initiative for such an undertaking may need to come from Europe, given that Republicans and Democrats in the United States are united in their hardline approach toward China.

Europe and the United States may have similar objectives in dealing with China, but Europe is more economically integrated with China in terms of investment and trade flows. Because of this, the competitive aspect of their relationship offers more potential for mutual benefit. Moreover, Europe is neither as preoccupied with great power politics nor as dependent on technological advantages as the United States, making the bloc more open to compromise.

If the United States wants to preserve its technological and moral authority, it must first deal with economic and political weaknesses at home. Bemoaning China’s unfair policies and its authoritarian regime will not solve this problem. Instead, the United States should focus on strengthening its own economic competitiveness, forging internal political cohesion, and working with European and Asian partners to build enduring international institutions.

Yukon Huang is a senior fellow in the Carnegie Asia Program, where his research focuses on China’s economy and its regional and global impact.

Carnegie does not take institutional positions on public policy issues; the views represented herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Carnegie, its staff, or its trustees.

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Samantha Kromkowski — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 19:46:53 +0000

As the Sino-American trade war approaches its fourth year, there is ample evidence to show that both sides have been harmed by the tit-for-tat exchange of protectionist measures. But, far from spelling an end to globalization, the conflict may have laid the foundation for an even more robust world trading system.

NEW HAVEN – The United States-China trade war started in 2018 and has never officially ended. So, which side has been “winning” it? Recent research offers an unambiguous answer: neither. US tariffs on Chinese goods led to higher import prices in the US in the affected product categories, and China’s retaliatory tariffs on US goods ended up hurting Chinese importers. Bilateral trade between the two countries has tanked. And because the US and China are the world’s two largest economies, many regard this development as a harbinger of the end of globalization.

Yet the “deglobalization” bodog sportsbook review argument ignores the many “bystander” countries that were not directly targeted by the US or China. In a new paper investigating the effects of the trade war on these countries, my co-authors and I come to an unexpected conclusion: Many, but not all, of these bystander countries have benefited from the trade war in the form of higher exports.

To be sure, one would expect exports from third countries (Mexico, Vietnam, Malaysia, etc.) to take the place of Chinese exports to the US. But what is surprising is that these countries increased their exports not only to the US but also to the rest of the world. In fact, global trade in the products affected by the trade war seems to have increased by 3% relative to global trade in the products not targeted by tariffs. That means the trade war did not just lead to reallocation of third-country exports to the US (or China); it also resulted in net trade creation.

Given that trade wars are not generally associated with this outcome, what accounts for it? One potential explanation is that some bystander countries saw the trade war as an opportunity to increase their presence in world markets. By investing in additional trade capacity or mobilizing existing idle capacity, they could increase their exports without increasing their prices.

Another explanation is that as bystander countries started exporting more to the US or China, their unit costs of production declined, because economies of scale allowed them to offer more at lower prices. Consistent with these explanations, our paper finds that the countries with the largest increases in global exports are those in which export prices are declining.

While the net effect of the trade war on the world economy was an increase in trade, there was enormous variation across countries. Some countries increased their exports significantly; some increased their exports to the US at the expense of their exports elsewhere (they reallocated trade); and some countries simply lost exports by selling less to the US and to the rest of the world. What accounts for these differences, and what could countries have done to ensure larger gains from the trade war?

Again, the answers are somewhat surprising. One might have guessed that the most important factor explaining countries’ differing experiences would be pre-trade-war specialization patterns. Countries such as Malaysia and Vietnam, for example, were lucky to be producing a heavily affected product category like machinery. Yet specialization patterns appear to have mattered little, judging by the big export winners of the trade war: South Africa, Turkey, Egypt, Romania, Mexico, Singapore, the Netherlands, Belgium, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic.

What mattered instead were two key country characteristics: participation in “deep” trade agreements (defined as regimes covering not only tariffs but also other measures of behind-the-border protection); and accumulated foreign direct investment. Countries that had a high pre-existing degree of international trade integration benefited the most. Trade agreements tend to reduce the fixed costs of expanding in foreign markets, and existing arrangements may have partly offset the uncertainty generated by the trade Bodog Poker war. Similarly, higher FDI is a reliable proxy for greater social, political, and economic ties to foreign markets.

Supply-chain effects also may have played an important role. In a prescient policy briefing based on private conversations with executives at large multinationals, analysts at the Peterson Institute for International Economics predicted in 2016 that US tariffs would “set off a daisy chain of production shifts.”

If a company decided to shift production of a product targeted by Chinese tariffs to a third country, this would necessitate a reshuffling of other activities in the third country, affecting multiple other countries in turn. The exact pattern of these responses would have been hard to predict, given the complexity of modern supply chains. But a country’s degree of international integration appears to have been a decisive factor in a firm’s relocation decisions.

Returning to our initial question, then, the big winner of the trade war seems to be “bystander” countries with deep international ties. From the US perspective, the trade war did not lead to the advertised reshoring of economic activity, at least in the short to medium term. Instead, Chinese imports to the US were simply replaced by imports from other countries.

From the perspective of “bystander” countries, the trade war, ironically, demonstrated the importance of trade integration, especially deep trade agreements and FDI. Fortunately, the Sino-American trade war does not spell the end of globalization. Rather, it may mark the beginning of a new world trading system that no longer has the US or China at its center.

Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg, a former World Bank Group chief economist and editor-in-chief of the American Economic Review, is Professor of Economics at Yale University.

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Jake O'Keeffe — Wed, 08 Dec 2021 20:36:16 +0000

The Biden administration should change course and embrace a more open and liberal international trade policy

The trade war between the U.S. and its trading partners began in early 2018. Initial tariffs on steel and aluminum were followed by several waves of tariffs on a wide range of products. As time passed, the Trump administration’s protectionist trade policy zeroed in on the trade practices of China. These policies were motivated by questionable national security concerns and what the administration thought were unfair policies (i.e., government subsidies to producers) in other countries, especially China.

The administration decided to use import tariffs as the primary policy tool to get China, as well as our other trading partners, to change polices that impact international trade. The president seemed to think this approach had few costs to the U.S. He argued that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” However, international trade policy is not carried out in a vacuum. Countries first tried to negotiate exemptions from the tariffs on their exports. When that failed, they retaliated with their own tariffs on U.S. exports to their own countries.

The result of the trade war was a net economic loss to the U.S. It was hardest on businesses and consumers that purchased imported goods. The policy was also a political loser. Republicans lost votes in the 2018 elections in those areas hard hit by the trade war. The Biden administration should take heed of these losses and end the trade war. This policy shift would be good for the economy and a political winner for Democrats in those parts of the country that were negatively impacted by the previous administration’s policies.

Why Do We Trade?

President Trump viewed international trade as a zero-sum game where one side wins and the other loses. This is contrary to basic economic theory, which explains that international trade is mutually beneficial. Countries export products (or services) they produce at a lower cost than their trading partners and import products (or services) that other countries produce relatively cheaply. International trade enables businesses to import raw materials and machinery at lower costs or of better quality than what they could buy in their home markets.

Moreover, consumers can purchase products and services at lower costs, raising their real income. The increased variety of differentiated products that results from international trade makes both businesses and consumers better off. Finally, opening up an economy to global markets expands the sales of U.S. businesses, which increases employment and profits. Higher profits benefit stockholders. Larger product markets also increase the payoff to investment in innovation, resulting in new and better products.

Direct Economic Costs of the Trade War

Early on, the Trump administration imposed import tariffs as a way of changing our trading partners’—especially China’s—behavior. It argued that allowing more steel and aluminum imports into the U.S. was a national security risk. The administration thought favorable treatment of export industries in China and the EU gave these businesses an unfair advantage over U.S. firms at home and in world markets.

An import tariff raises the price of a product in the home market, so on the surface, imposing such tariffs is a bad policy move. But it is generally argued that for a large country like the U.S., the tariff-caused decrease in purchases of the product in global markets is large enough to cause the global price to decline: Foreign sellers would effectively end up paying part of the tariff and would receive a lower after-tariff price. As a result, the home price would end up rising by an amount less than the tariff, making it less costly to U.S. consumers. Using this logic, President Trump said the Chinese would be paying for the steel and aluminum import tariffs, not American businesses and consumers.

However, recent research has found that domestic prices on products subject to the tariffs actually rose by the full amount of the tariff. The reason for this result is still an open question. In the case of Chinese exporters, it appears that they were able to sell more of their product in markets outside the U.S., stabilizing the international price. Businesses may have increased demand in anticipation of higher future tariffs. Finally, long-term contracts may have kept the price from changing. Regardless of the cause, however, the bottom line is that American businesses and consumers ended up bearing the cost of the tariffs.

One study recently updated its calculations on the costs and net gain or loss from imposing the import tariff, factoring in the retaliation tariffs on U.S. products sold abroad during the trade war period (2018-19). It finds the average U.S. tariff increased from 3.7% to 25.8% for 17,495 products worth $420.6 billion (17.6% of total imports in 2017). The retaliatory tariffs on U.S. exports rose from 8.7% to 20.8% for 8,400 products worth $133.9 billion (8.7% of 2017 total exports). Given these significant increases in tariffs, it is not surprising that U.S. exports and imports declined.

The study not only calculates the increased cost to businesses and consumers from the tariff, but also computes the value of any net production effects that might have occurred because of the U.S. import tariff and foreign retaliatory tariffs. Finally, it calculates the tariff revenue raised by the government. For the 2018-19 period, consumers and businesses that purchased imported products paid $114.2 billion more for their purchases. In terms of production effects, output can increase in the protected industry, contract for downstream users of the protected products and decrease in the industries experiencing retaliatory tariffs. Accounting for these possibilities, net production gains equaled $24.3 billion, and tariff revenue equaled $65 billion. The net loss to the country—the $114.2 billion consumers paid, minus the net production gains and tariff revenue—was $24.9 billion. In other words, the country was made worse off because of the trade war. Consumers and businesses that purchase imported goods were hit the hardest by these policies.

Another recent study uses an economic-growth model to estimate the long-term effects of the trade war if the Trump trade policies were to continue in the Biden administration. In this scenario, U.S. GDP would be almost $60 billion lower, and employment (measured by full-time-equivalent jobs) would decline by 176,800. If our trading partners were to implement additional tariffs (that they have already announced), U.S. GDP would decrease by an additional roughly $10 billion, and another 30,000 full-time-equivalent jobs would be lost. The trade policies of the Trump administration negatively impacted many individual businesses and consumers. On net, these policies resulted in fewer jobs and lower incomes for Americans as a whole.

Political Costs of the Trade War

Several academic papers (Fetzer and Schwarz, Blanchard, Bown and Choc, Kim and Margalitand Chyzh and Urbatsch) examine whether the trade war had political consequences for Republican candidates during the 2018 midterm congressional elections. The higher costs of imported products from the original tariffs, plus declining sales overseas because of the retaliatory tariffs imposed by our trading partners, harmed certain groups and areas of the country more than others. If voters in these areas blamed Republicans for their economic distress, it is possible that Republicans would have lost votes.

Complicating matters, countries imposing retaliatory tariffs may have chosen products that are disproportionally produced in Republican areas. For example, they might target industries that are concentrated in states that voted for Trump in the 2016 presidential election. They might also target congressional districts that had close elections that a Republican won in 2016. The idea behind such strategies would be to impose tariffs on U.S. products that would inflict the greatest political damage for Republican candidates. Countries could adopt such a policy to apply pressure to change U.S. trade policy.

All the papers listed above find that the trade war reduced the Republican share of votes in the 2018 congressional elections. By one estimate, the trade war cost Republicans between five and eight House seats. These papers also provide evidence that the retaliatory tariffs were in fact directed at districts where the previous election was close.

The Trump administration responded in two ways. First, since agricultural states—particularly heavy soybean-producing states—were hard hit (in terms of lower prices and sales) by China’s retaliatory tariffs on U.S. soybeans, those states received direct federal aid worth up to $12 billion. The aid went to producers of soybeans and other major export crops, such as corn. Second, the administration included a relief program as part of the tariff policy. Businesses that imported intermediate goods (raw materials and capital goods such as machinery) could file a request for exemption from the import tariff if it inflicted serious economic harm on their operations. In addition, to receive an exclusion, the business had to show it could not purchase the product of sufficient quality and quantity domestically. Only about 13% of the exclusion requests were granted.

However, the exclusion program was used politically by the administration. According to one study of steel exclusion requests for the 2018-19 period, the probability of getting an exemption increased by 30-40% if the firm was in a state that Trump won in 2016, compared with a similar company located in a state that Trump lost. Politics clearly played a central role in the trade policy decisions of all the players in the trade war (U.S., China and the EU).

The Need for an Alternative Approach

The Trump administration began using tariffs in 2018 as a policy tool to correct what it perceived as economic imbalances in the post-World War II international trading system. The result of these actions was a trade war. Contrary to the claims of the administration, research has shown the trade war resulted in a net economic loss to the U.S.

The economic loss was exacerbated by the actions of our trading partners, who retaliated with tariffs on U.S. goods sold in their markets. In addition, these retaliatory tariffs caused political losses: They targeted Republican-leaning congressional districts, and districts where the election was close, in 2018. As a result, Republicans lost votes in the 2018 elections. Thus, the trade war made little economic or political sense for Republicans. If the current administration chooses to continue this path, it too may experience related political losses in the upcoming 2022 elections.

The Trump administration gained very little in exchange for these losses from the trade-war approach. All it got was the Phase One agreement with China, which postponed additional tariff increases from both nations and modestly reduced some of the most recent tariffs imposed by the Trump administration. Most of the tariffs remained in place.

Moreover, a major component of the Phase One agreement was that China would purchase more U.S. goods. So far, Chinese purchases of U.S. goods have fallen short of the agreement’s goals, though the pandemic has played a role in this shortfall. Bottom line, the trade war generated little change in China. Rather than promoting free trade, the Trump administration’s actions were an economically dangerous movement toward a managed trade system that is subject to political manipulation.

The current policy issue is how the Biden administration will handle trade relations with China and other U.S. trading partners. Will the administration continue with Trump’s approach to trade or move closer to the pre-Trump, more liberal international trading system? At this point, the jury is still out. Given the cost and lack of success of President Trump’s approach, a reset is clearly needed. It makes the most sense to return to a freer trading system that benefited the U.S., its trading partners and the emerging economies of the world.

Robert Krol is an emeritus professor of economics at California State University, Northridge; a Senior Affiliated Scholar for the Mercatus Center at George Mason University; and a member of the Heartland Institute’s Board of Policy Advisors. He also worked as an economist at Security Pacific National Bank in Los Angeles and the Milken Institute in Santa Monica, California. He received his PhD in economics from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale in 1982.

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Jude Althagafi — Mon, 30 Aug 2021 15:49:05 +0000

Two months before the next big United Nations climate conference in November, the three biggest greenhouse gas emitters—the United States, Europe, and China—are at loggerheads over how to reduce reliance on fossil fuels without excessively disadvantaging their own economies. Their confrontation is based on fears that if each country or region takes tough steps on climate change, the other two players will take unfair advantage in the arena of international trade.

DIFFERENT CARBON LIMITATION POLICIES

The United States, China, and Europe have committed themselves to raising the penalty for carbon emissions but at different speeds and with different coverage and approaches. Raising the carbon penalty, through taxes, trading systems, or regulations will inevitably make home-produced goods and services more expensive. The fear therefore is that nations with less ambitious efforts will export goods that are cheaper because their penalties are less costly. This fear, in turn, inspires concern in other countries that their exports will be unfairly penalized by protectionist measures. For example, Europe is now threatening a new array of carbon tariffs, while the United States and China are threatening to retaliate. These threats could lead to an escalation of protectionist actions that would undermine the world trading system.

One possible solution to this problem may be to bring in the World Trade Organization (WTO) to adjudicate differences while preserving momentum for tackling carbon emissions. Time is running out if the climate change agenda goals are to be met. The meeting of the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26), starting November 1 in Glasgow, will provide a test of whether these competing interests can be reconciled.

Both the European Union and the United States have released border tax proposals as part of their green initiatives. The primary purpose of border adjustments is to prevent “carbon leakage”—shorthand for the risk that high-carbon imported goods, paying little or no carbon fees, will take market share from low-carbon fee-paying domestic firms, thereby defeating the effort to reduce global emissions while harming the domestic industry. But border tax proposals are controversial for two reasons: First, trading partners fear disguised protection that violates WTO rules; second, many observers believe that the proposals, if implemented, will provoke opposition and obstruct cooperative action to reduce global emissions.

After a summer of fires, droughts, floods, and furnace-like temperatures, public demand for decisive measures is overwhelming. The heat wave sweeping northwestern North America in late June 2021 caused 569 heat-related deaths in British Columbia. Meanwhile, in mid-July, China faced devastating floods across central Henan province, leading to 302 deaths and 50 missing persons. Responding to these calamities, China, the United States, and the European Union have proposed updates to their emission reduction commitments, aligning with their own political and economic constraints. The table below summarizes the proposals.

CHINA OPENS NATIONAL CARBON TRADING MARKET AND HAS NOT PROPOSED BORDER TAX ON CARBON

China is the latest to announce new measures. After years of localized pilot programs, China opened its long-awaited national carbon trading market on July 16, 2021. In the initial phase, the scheme covers 2,225 power plants. The government will hand out free allowances to cover firms for part of their emissions. Allowances are benchmarked against previous performance, and firms can trade allowances on the market. A company that has excess allowances thanks to cutting its emissions can sell them; a company that has more emissions than allowances can buy enough to make up the shortfall.

Importantly, China has not yet promised to decrease allowances over time. This is unfortunate since some power plants may relax their efforts to cut emissions and instead just rely on their historic quota of free allowances. While the market currently only covers the power sector, officials have indicated that other high-polluting industries such as steel, cement, chemical, electrolytic aluminum, and papermaking—some of them already covered in local pilot programs—could be covered in later stages.

Meanwhile, China has not proposed border measures, both because its current scheme does not impose high carbon prices and because it disapproves of the border measures proposed by the European Union and United States. Apart from the carbon trading market, Yi Gang, Governor of the People’s Bank of China, announced in June that the PBOC plans to launch mandatory climate-related disclosure requirements on domestic commercial banks and subsequently expand the requirements to listed companies.

US AND EU LEGISLATORS PROPOSE BORDER TAXES ON CARBON

While China built its emissions trading system (ETS) along lines similar to the European Union, the United States so far lacks a domestic carbon pricing scheme, either through a carbon tax or trading system. However, even without a domestic tax or ETS, a group of Democrats in Congress unveiled proposals for a border carbon adjustment tariff effective January 1, 2024. The scheme would cover carbon-intensive goods that are “exposed to trade competition,” including aluminum, cement, iron, steel, natural gas, petroleum, and coal. This list would expand as the United States improves its calculations of the carbon intensity of different goods. Importers would pay a carbon fee based on costs that US producers are calculated to incur complying with domestic environmental standards and the quantity of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with each covered good, both determined by the Treasury Department.

Building on its mature ETS, the European Union’s legislative body, the European Commission, proposed a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) to prevent carbon leakage. Goods at high risks of carbon leakage, including iron and steel, cement, fertilizer, aluminum, and electricity generation, are prospectively covered by CBAM. The Commission envisages a transition period between 2023 and 2025, when importers need only report emissions embedded in their products. Border fees will be collected starting in 2026. Importers will buy CBAM certificates (i.e., pay import fees) for covered goods.

The price of the European import fee would differ from the price in the pending US measure. Because the European Union has an operating ETS, the price of its import fee will be based on the weekly average auction price of EU ETS allowances expressed in euros per ton of CO2 emitted. For covered products, CBAM fees will apply to the proportion of emissions that exceed free allowance allocations under the EU ETS, which will gradually phase out from 2026. Importers can claim credits to offset select foreign carbon fees paid on embedded emissions. At a future date, the European Central Bank intends to incorporate climate considerations into its policy framework.

RETALIATION THREATS AND WTO RULES: POSSIBLE RECONCILIATION

The US and EU border tariffs schemes have prompted opponents to complain about the impact on international trade. US climate envoy John Kerry expressed concerns about the EU CBAM, and Australian prime minister Scott Morrison declared that carbon tariffs are “simply trade protectionism by another name.” As an economy that is expected to be hit hard by the border adjustment plans, China also voiced objections, saying that CBAM violates WTO rules, will seriously undermine the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, will erode mutual trust in the global community, and curb prospects for economic growth .

As carbon tariffs are debated by lawmakers and move through US and EU legislative bodies, their compatibility with WTO rules will be vigorously contested. Importantly, both the US and the EU proposals grant discretionary exemptions to qualified trading partners. While seemingly benign, such exemptions could put border adjustments in violation of the WTO’s non-discrimination rule. Furthermore, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), signed in 1947 and reaffirmed with the creation of the WTO in 1994,mandates in Article III that taxes on imported products should not exceed those imposed on like domestic products. The EU free allowances on CBAM products (which can be seen as a subsidy) and the absence of a US domestic carbon tax both raise national treatment questions.

As a recent Canadian policy paper observes, many countries will adopt their own tax, trading, and regulatory systems to reduce carbon emissions. Most will adopt border measures to avert carbon leakage and market loss by high emitting industries. Foremost the border measures will protect domestic markets against imports, but in some cases export rebates will seek to preserve markets abroad. A multitude of conflicting border measures seems a sure formula for serious trade friction.

To reduce if not eliminate trade friction, WTO members should create an expert body to calculate (and periodically update) the tax equivalent of domestic carbon restrictions—be they fees or regulations—imposed by member countries. Further, each member should give appropriate credit in their border measures, according to these calculations, for taxes or tax equivalents previously paid on imports that arrive from other members. Collectively, WTO members should agree that, when credit is given consistent with the foregoing calculations, no member will bring a case asserting violation of WTO rules with respect to its exports. To be sure, this is a bold proposal, but perhaps within the realm of political acceptance. As a promising first step, members should accept a two-year moratorium on border measures, giving time for serious calculations.

Gary Clyde Hufbauer, nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, was the Institute’s Reginald Jones Senior Fellow from 1992 to January 2018.

To read the full commentary from the Peterson Institute for International Economics, please click here.

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Jude Althagafi — Tue, 17 Aug 2021 15:44:45 +0000

US sanctions and Chinese countermeasures related to the situation in Hong Kong threaten to ignite the tinderbox of US-China economic relations. That potential conflagration could soon endanger not only bilateral trade and finance but also cooperation to counter global warming and nuclear proliferation. Yet officials in both countries, along with business leaders, seem complacent about the risks inherent in escalating the US-China sanctions war. Neither side is likely to give in to the other’s economic pressure, but both need to temper and contain the scope of their escalatory actions.

As discussed in a recent PIIE Policy Brief, the new Chinese anti-sanctions law bars Chinese nationals from complying with US sanctions. That law, promulgated by the National People’s Congress (NPC) in June 2021, may soon be applied to individuals and firms doing business in Hong Kong. The NPC will shortly consider appending it to the Hong Kong Basic Law, handing a powerful tool against those seeking to maintain Hong Kong as a special administrative region for legal and economic matters. Threats and denunciations in the West have done little to deter China’s growing dominance over Hong Kong’s Legislative Council and legal system, eroding the “one country, two systems” guarantee in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration.

Chinese responses to US sanctions had been relatively low key partly because most US sanctions against China involved violations of US secondary sanctions against North Korea and Iran and were limited to the imposition of fines against the guilty parties. That playbook has changed as Chinese policies in Xinjiang and Hong Kong increasingly have become the primary target of US sanctions. US officials, invoking the Hong Kong Autonomy Act of 2020, the Global Magnitsky Act, and various executive orders, have increased the number of Chinese and Hong Kong individuals and entities subject to trade, finance, and travel sanctions over the past year.

In turn, Chinese officials have begun to upgrade their sanctions arsenal. In September-October 2020, China amplified its existing “Unreliable Entity List” and Export Control Law, akin to those administered by the US Commerce Department and used to restrict trade with Chinese firms. These measures were supplemented in January 2021 with new Chinese sanctions blocking rules, subsequently embodied in the June 2021 anti-sanctions law, to force Chinese nationals not to comply with US and other foreign sanctions. Then soon after the Biden administration issued a business advisory warning on July 16, 2021, about “growing risks” for US companies doing business in Hong Kong, China announced that it plans to incorporate the new anti-sanctions powers into Hong Kong law, which reportedly will be done by the NPC Standing Committee when it meets on August 17–20, 2021.

The prospect for success in changing the other’s policies via sanctions is remote. Sanctions rarely “work” (meaning contribute at least modestly to a change in the target’s policy) in cases seeking major changes in the target regime’s policies. But both the United States and China seem intent on using them with increasing frequency against each other.

HONG KONG: WILL US SANCTIONS BOOMERANG?

Sanctions often generate unintended and costly consequences. Two troubling developments regarding Hong Kong already have arisen in the wake of the tit-for-tat US and Chinese sanctions. First, US sanctions have abetted an accelerated push by Chinese leaders to remove the veneer of independent administrative and legal practices that have provided Hong Kong its special status since China took back control of the territories from the United Kingdom in July 1997. Second, China adopted a new law barring Chinese nationals (including foreign firms invested in China) from complying with foreign sanctions, which will soon be enforceable in Hong Kong.

The Trump administration removed Hong Kong’s special customs status in response to the imposition of the national security law. US officials seemed to have calculated that US trade sanctions would bite and that Beijing would not risk undercutting Hong Kong’s status as an international financial center by imposing more control on its legal and political system. They misread the situation: The US action had minimal impact on US merchandise trade with Hong Kong; US firms don’t buy much that is produced in Hong Kong—most goods shipped from Hong Kong are re-exports subject to US customs duties applied to their originating countries. Moreover, Hong Kong had long since become a services economy rather than a manufacturing hub, and its value as a financial center depends increasingly on access to Chinese capital markets.

Removing Hong Kong’s special status worked at cross purposes to US interests. The US action did little to punish China, and Chinese officials continue unabated in their goal of accelerating Hong Kong’s immersion in the Chinese mainstream.

In addition, US sanctions against Chinese “domestic” policies led China to promulgate its own anti-sanctions law. When annexed under the Hong Kong Basic Law, another area of nationwide Chinese policies will become Hong Kong law without action by the Hong Kong Legislative Council, just as occurred with the national security law in 2020. And like the national security law, the anti-sanctions law will likely be enforced and litigated increasingly strictly by Hong Kong authorities and courts consistent with policy directives from Chinese Communist Party officials.

Financial firms that fund and help execute trade and investment in China have so far avoided being hit by the sanctions tussle and are surprisingly complacent about the current business climate. But the risk is growing. International financial firms operating in Hong Kong will be increasingly vulnerable to US penalties as more of their Chinese clients are targeted by US sanctions. And then they will also come under the threat of Chinese countersanctions, unless they ignore foreign sanctions targeting Chinese nationals and take their chances with US sanctions enforcers.

CLASH OF THE SANCTIONS TITANS?

Tit-for-tat sanctions are likely to be the new normal in US-China relations. The imposition of sanctions is built into US trade and export control laws, and Congress is in no mood to lessen the pressure of such actions against China. And now China seems determined to reciprocate in kind with the new legal authorities wielded by officials in both Beijing and Hong Kong. And as the sanctions war escalates, so too does the risk that financial institutions will be caught in the sanctions’ web of one or both countries.

Sanctions have made doing business with China more complicated and costly. US sanctions and China’s new anti-sanctions policy are likely to force firms operating in China to pick sides: us or them. Some will comply with Chinese laws and forgo the US market; others will leave the Chinese market. High tech firms already are facing this commercial reality and restructuring their supply chains. If financial institutions are forced to exit the US or Chinese market because of sanctions policies, the collateral damage to trade and investment will increase.

One would presume that neither side wants a sharp decoupling of their economies, though rabid political voices in both countries are trying to incite that outcome. Both are worse off in economic terms with the escalation of tit-for-tat sanctions. But neither side is likely to shift its policies in the face of economic coercion by the other; each will likely accept increased economic costs in defense of its strategic interests.

Can the escalating cascade of sanctions be contained or restrained before the measures rupture economic relations critically important to both countries and their trading partners? More is at stake than bilateral and regional commercial relations; the ongoing sanctions war also complicates the task of the two superpowers working together on climate change, nuclear nonproliferation in Asia, and responses to the current and future pandemics. Thus, a counsel of caution is in order; US and Chinese officials should be very careful about how they escalate sanctions against each other.

Before the two powers embark on another costly clash, they should consider other strategic responses as a complement or substitute for sanctions. China is already doing so by aligning more closely with Asian neighbors in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and its Belt and Road Initiative. The United States could follow that example and support the accession of more democratic nations to its original Trans-Pacific Partnership and should consider—to strengthen relations with strategic allies in the region—a return to the pact in 2022.

Jeffrey J. Schott joined the Peterson Institute for International Economics in 1983 and is a senior fellow working on international trade policy and economic sanctions.

To read the full commentary from the Peterson Institute for International Economics, please click here.

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Caroline Hillier — Wed, 21 Apr 2021 15:09:45 +0000

Before Donald Trump became president in 2017, Americans paid tariffs on just two percent of their imported goods. The average tariff rate was 1.7 percent.

In 2018, however, Trump launched his global trade wars. “[W]e have a Trade Deficit of $500 billion per year,” he tweeted in April 2018. “We cannot let this continue!” He slapped tariffs on two-thirds of Chinese exports and on metals sold by nearly every other country—friend and foe alike. By the end of that year, Americans were paying tariffs on 15 percent of their imports. By 2019, the average tariff rate had shot up to 13.8 percent.

As the left-hand figure above illustrates, Trump expected his massive wall of tariffs to push the U.S. current account balance (of which trade is the biggest component) upwards, toward surplus. Yet the reality, as we now know, is that it fell deeper into deficit.

And what happened to the countries which were the primary target of Trump’s ire? As the right-hand figure shows, the current account balances of China and NAFTA partners Canada and Mexico all increased. Mexico’s balance rose by a whopping 12.5 percent. And recall that Trump had claimed that Mexico had “paid for the wall” through the change in trade flows wrought by his USMCA agreement. Nothing could be more logically or empirically preposterous.

So how did Trump get tariffs so wrong? Well, first, the countries he targeted retaliated. Canada and Mexico slapped tariffs on American metals. And China imposed tariffs on a whopping 58 percent of U.S. exports. Second, the tariffs hurt the export competitiveness of U.S. companies which had to pay more for critical intermediate goods imported for use in domestic production. Third, and most importantly, tariffs, in theory as well as practice, have little influence on trade balances. Instead, macroeconomic factors—such as fiscal policy, demographics, domestic demand, exchange rates, and supply-side policies such as state subsidies—have predominant influence.

Most damning, however, is the fact that the trade balance, as we’ve pointed out before, bears no empirical relation to either GDP growth or employment. This fact means not just that the effort to move it through tariffs is bound to failure, but that any movement toward surplus will not, in itself, improve a country’s economic welfare. Trump therefore committed the double sin of doing the wrong thing for the wrong purpose—and harming American industry, workers, and consumers in the process.

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Ann Marie Caton — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 14:43:34 +0000

Although President Donald Trump has not conceded the United States presidential election and is mounting multiple dubious legal challenges to the results, President-elect Joe Biden is moving ahead with the transition. While Biden did not focus on Southeast Asia during his time as vice president from 2009 until 2017, he probably has more extensive foreign policy experience than any incoming president in decades, save perhaps George H. W. Bush. In addition, his policy team includes a deep bench of experts on the Asia-Pacific region.

When it comes to Biden’s approach to Southeast Asia, persistent tensions in the U.S. relationship with China are a major factor. While perhaps less openly confrontational toward China than Trump has been, many of the Democratic Party’s foreign policy experts have become much more distrustful of Beijing in recent years and convinced that the United States’ previous strategies have failed. The incoming Biden administration probably will recognize that, to pursue a tough approach against China, the U.S. cannot afford to alienate critical partners in Southeast Asia, the way the Trump administration has done. Biden is also likely to reinvest in some areas of American power that were neglected under Trump, from diplomacy to a renewed focus on nontraditional security threats like climate change, which will appeal to Southeast Asian states.

Many countries in the region are growing more distrustful of China as well, given its increasingly aggressive behavior and its expansive territorial claims in the South China Sea, but Southeast Asia cannot divorce itself from Beijing. China is the region’s biggest trading partner and the largest aid donor to several Southeast Asian states. Still, countries like Singapore and Vietnam, and even to some extent Malaysia and Indonesia, have grown increasingly concerned about China’s heavy-handed approach to the region and have quietly applauded some of the Trump administration’s tough measures toward Beijing.

As president, Biden’s approach to the region will in some respects resemble Trump’s. He likely will continue to rebalance the U.S. military toward the Asia-Pacific, boosting regional military cooperation with allies in the region and continuing to harden U.S. defenses and those of its allies. Like Trump, Biden will also need to find ways to counter Chinese influence activities in the U.S. and elsewhere, and will continue pressuring other countries to keep Chinese firms like Huawei out of their new 5G telecommunications networks, though he will have less success with this strategy in Asia than in Europe.

Yet Biden might diverge in how he tries to attract other countries to support his China policy. Trump’s trade disputes with many Southeast Asian countries made it harder for them to align with Washington on other issues. For example, the Trump administration repeatedly criticized Vietnam for its high trade surplus with the United States and is investigating Vietnam for currency manipulation. It also recently suspended duty-free access for some $800 million in Thai imports because Thailand has not opened up enough to U.S. agriculture, and seemed to threaten tough trade action against Indonesia earlier this year if it bought weapons from Russia and China. (Indonesia caved and did not follow through with the purchases.)

While some of these trade-related complaints may have merit, the Biden administration will probably want to ease the pressure on Southeast Asia when it comes to trade policy. It will likely go easier on Vietnam and Indonesia, both of which are important security partners for the U.S., and on Thailand, a treaty ally. After all, to court Southeast Asian states that are caught between the United States and China, it makes little sense to also tighten the trade screws on these very same countries.

Southeast Asian leaders can expect a more conventional and engaged approach to the region from the incoming Biden administration.

Beyond its dealings with individual countries, Biden’s overall approach to trade and investment in the region might be constrained by domestic politics. Trump won election in 2016 while railing against giant multilateral trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which he withdrew from as soon as he took office. Subsequently, he focused primarily on bilateral trade agreements, even as East Asian countries forged ahead with major regional deals like the reconstituted TPP, now known as the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the recently signed Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership.

It will be difficult for Biden to reengage with Asia’s regional trade integration efforts in a meaningful way. Major segments of the U.S. population are skeptical of new trade deals, perhaps even more than in 2016, when even Hillary Clinton, Trump’s Democratic opponent in that year’s election, disavowed the TPP, a deal she had once praised. Moreover, Biden will likely enter office with Republicans in control of the Senate—unless the Democrats somehow manage to sweep both Senate seats in Georgia that will be decided in runoffs in January. Even with a slim Democratic majority in the Senate, though, Biden will have little political capital to expend on trade.

We can also expect a renewed U.S. focus on nontraditional security issues under Biden, which are important in Southeast Asia. While the Trump administration has mostly eschewed multilateral cooperation on COVID-19, Biden has pledged to work more closely with other countries on strategies to contain the pandemic. Since some countries in Southeast Asia, like Thailand and Vietnam, have had the most successful responses to COVID-19, the new administration could seek out their guidance. More broadly, Biden has tasked his new administration with broadening the definition of national security to include not only public health, but also climate change and other issues. That shift will be welcomed in Southeast Asia, one of the regions of the world most endangered by rising sea levels.

In tackling these challenges, simply picking up the phone or dispatching low-level envoys won’t be enough. Southeast Asian leaders value face time from their counterparts. Biden’s old boss, former President Barack Obama, made it a priority to regularly attend Southeast Asia’s most high-profile summits, barring a few instances when pressing domestic crises prevented him from traveling. Trump at first continued this policy, making a long trip to East Asia during his first year in office to attend key regional gatherings, but U.S. delegations to subsequent meetings were headed by lower-level officials, offending some Southeast Asian leaders. Biden will probably show up in the region more often, and he already has named several officials with Asia experience to top posts in the new administration.

Trump also left key national security posts unfilled across the State Department and the Pentagon. The Biden administration will likely take a more professionalized approach and move to fill many of those positions, including a deeper bench of senior and mid-level officials who deal with issues related to Southeast Asia.

When it comes to human rights issues and democracy promotion in Southeast Asia, Trump has shown only modest interest, consistent with his overall foreign policy approach. In fairness, the Trump White House has taken a tougher approach to Myanmar and Cambodia. But Trump has praised Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal war on drugs and built closer ties with Thailand, despite a highly questionable election in 2019 and the government’s repression of pro-democracy protests. The Trump administration also invited Indonesian Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto for a visit to Washington, despite longstanding allegations of atrocities committed by troops under Prabowo’s command when he led Indonesia’s notorious special forces.

Southeast Asian countries would do well to temper their expectations. After all, Biden’s focus when he first takes office will be on containing the pandemic and boosting the struggling U.S. economy, all while trying to navigate Washington’s partisan gridlock. But overall, they can expect a more conventional and engaged approach to the region, in an effort to soothe tensions at a time when Biden will have many fires to put out at home and elsewhere in the world.

Joshua Kurlantzick is senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations.

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Ann Marie Caton — Mon, 16 Nov 2020 16:42:27 +0000

China may claim a symbolic victory in the signing of the world’s biggest trade deal in the face of ongoing US disinterest in multilateralism, but the direct economic benefits will be marginal, studies show.

The trade agreement, initiated by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) in 2012 but often regarded as a China-led counterpart to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), covers nearly one third of the world’s population and gross domestic product (GDP).

However, while membership of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) will add incrementally to Chinese GDP, it will not be enough to cancel out the damage of the trade war with the United States, research showed.In June, researchers at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) found that RCEP, a trade deal that took seven years to negotiate, would add 0.4 per cent to China’s real income by 2030, while the trade war would trim 1.1 per cent, should current hostilities persist.

It will make China much more integrated with the rest of Asia, and we need to look at what that might generate in the longer termRenuka Mahadevan.

A study conducted last year by researchers at the University of Queensland and the Indonesian Ministry of Finance found that RCEP would add just 0.08 per cent to China’s economy by 2030. Over the same period, the trade war would slice 0.32 per cent from its GDP.

Renuka Mahadevan, an associate professor at the University of Queensland who co-authored the 2019 report, said because of the dent made in the regional economy by the coronavirus pandemic, the benefit of RCEP might be more pronounced for signatories, since growth was coming from a lower base.

Nonetheless, she said the numbers were only “part of the story” for China, for which the agreement was about more than marginal growth gains.

“I do think it will help China a great deal. It will make China much more integrated with the rest of Asia, and we need to look at what that might generate in the longer term,” Mahadevan said, referring specifically to investment flows around Asia.

The PIIE study found that “China is poised to become the largest beneficiary of RCEP” in its current guise, which does not include India.

Nonetheless, authors Peter Petri and Michael Plummer predicted the deal would fail to offset the damage done by the trade war and the trade diversion caused by the rival CPTPP, particularly for light and advanced manufacturers.

Again though, they alluded to ulterior motives for China in getting the deal over the line.

“Even more important than economic gains, however, may be the effects of East Asia’s regional turn on China’s prospects for leadership in the region. The CPTPP and RCEP15 agreements, without the United States and India, remove powerful balancing influences in determining economic policies in East Asia,” they wrote, adding that the Asian trade sphere might become more China-centric as a result.

Researchers at the Beijing-backed Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) were slightly more bullish on the prospects of RCEP for China’s economy, estimating that over 10 years it would add 0.22 per cent to real GDP growth and 11.4 per cent to China’s total exports, should the schedule for trade liberalisation unfold as planned.

“RCEP will not only improve the external trade environment, but also provide a new growth driver for the Chinese economy,” wrote Shen Minghui and Li Tianguo in the CASS report.

Liang Yixin, a researcher with the China Centre for Information Industry Development, affiliated with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, estimated the trade agreement would add 0.04 per cent to economic output by 2025, or 1.95 per cent to export growth.

Nick Marro, global trade lead at the Economist Intelligence Unit, said while the impact on the wider Asian economy might be “marginal”, “there are some interesting trade and tariff dynamics to watch for Northeast Asia”.

“We’re seeing China, Japan and South Korea brought together under a free-trade agreement for the first time. Those markets will lend a bit more weight to the economic significance of the deal,” said Marro.

Finbarr Bermingham has been reporting on Asian trade since 2014. Prior to this, he covered global trade and economics in London. He joined the Post in 2018, before which he was Asia Editor at Global Trade Review and Trade Correspondent for the International Business Times.

Frank Tang joined the Post in 2016 after a decade of China economy coverage and government policy analysis.

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Rachel Accorsi — Mon, 09 Nov 2020 14:24:38 +0000

The need to reform the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) agriculture subsidy rules and to clinch a deal that disciplines harmful fisheries subsidies are well known, and the latter agreement is now nearly within striking distance. These are important advances, which can be a boon to addressing long-standing hurdles in the field of sustainable development. As this work continues, WTO members are also debating why it remains so difficult to meet existing requirements to notify government support to their economic sectors – and what more can be done.

Most recently, the poor record in WTO subsidy notifications came to the fore during the 27 October meeting of the WTO’s Committee on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures. According to a meeting summary, over half of the WTO’s 164 members have yet to provide last year’s notifications, and dozens of members are behind on notifications for prior years, even as far back as 2015.

The US proposed setting timeframes for responding to written requests for subsidy information. According to the proposal, such requests would be dealt with in writing within 60 days, with responses to further questions limited to 30 days. Any outstanding requests would stay on the committee’s meeting agenda until resolved. It is not yet clear if that proposal will advance further.

The problems that WTO members face in complying with their existing notification obligations are familiar in trade circles, but can often fly under the radar as political debates and processes steal the limelight. However, these notifications are more than an exercise in transparency: they have practical implications for members’ ability to negotiate new rules and monitor implementation of existing commitments. Subsidy notifications can also be a significant factor in legal disputes – yet they can be difficult for countries with limited resources to keep up with.

Trade Disputes, Notification Challenges

Resolving this issue is not as simple as it might appear. Many governments have noted that the timelines and level of information needed for subsidy notifications can be cumbersome to implement in practice as the process often requires consolidating information from multiple federal government agencies as well as sub-central governments.

Meanwhile, some of the WTO’s best-known legal cases involve subsidy disputes, which have in turn fueled an in-depth discussion over what qualifies as a subsidy under WTO rules and how to track this spending. Among these are the “dueling disputes” between the US and the EU over subsidies to their respective aircraft sectors, which date back well over a decade and are still ongoing. Just last month, a WTO arbitrator gave the EU the green light to impose nearly USD 4 billion worth of countermeasures against the US, after the Appellate Body found the year prior that US subsidies to Boeing have yet to be brought in line with WTO rules.

The agriculture sector is also known for major trade disputes, including the ongoing case between China and the US over China’s subsidies for wheat and corn. Trade disputes have also covered renewable energy subsidies linked to local content requirements, among various other issues.

These cases are so sensitive – and high-profile – partly because government subsidies, while often crucial to building an economic sector domestically, can make it difficult for other countries with limited public budgets to do the same. This is especially apparent in the case of cotton, where Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, and Mali, known collectively as the Cotton-4, or C-4 countries, have long been pushing for wholescale reform of marketing and export subsidies for cotton. Related negotiations have seen little progress despite a mandate for WTO members to find a solution “ambitiously, expeditiously and specifically.”

The US and Brazil also famously sparred at the WTO over the legality of Washington’s subsidies to its cotton sector. Brazil came within days of imposing WTO-authorized countermeasures that covered goods trade, as well as intellectual property rights protections and services trade.

Concerns Across WTO Bodies

The problem with subsidy notifications is also a regular concern across multiple WTO bodies that deal with goods trade. It has been a recurring complaint in the WTO’s Committee on Agriculture, given that the organization’s Agreement on Agriculture sets out a series of disciplines on agricultural domestic support, under which cases like the US-Brazil cotton dispute and the US-China agricultural subsidy dispute have been adjudicated.

Many WTO members are overdue on several years’ worth of farm subsidy notifications, and what these contain can vary significantly, according to recent analysis from the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). Several WTO members have complained that efforts to negotiate new disciplines on domestic farm subsidies will be moot if they have no sense of existing subsidy levels and types. These subsidies also help inform the picture of WTO members’ overall macroeconomic landscape, which is assessed on a regular basis during the organization’s trade policy review process.

The overall debate over subsidy notifications came to a head last year at the WTO’s Goods Council. In early 2019, the US and several co-sponsors put forward a proposal that would impose stiff “administrative measures” on WTO members who had fallen behind on their notification obligations, including on subsidies, which was later updated in July of that year. The proposal included language encouraging developing country members “to request assistance and support for capacity building from the Secretariat, either in the form of WTO trade-related technical assistance or as ad hoc-assistance for a particular notification,” if needed, along with notifying the relevant WTO bodies of the challenge they are facing.

The African Group, Cuba, and India criticized the move, noting the severe capacity challenges many countries face in meeting these obligations. They further noted that many developed countries must also do more to fulfil their own transparency obligations, from goods trade to services trade and intellectual property rights. Neither proposal led to a consensus outcome.

Ultimately, the subsidy notifications issue extends beyond the challenges faced by the WTO’s high-profile dispute settlement and negotiating pillars. It is part of a bigger discussion over the health and functioning of the WTO. Many WTO members and experts alike have flagged the need to consider how to support the work of the regular bodies further, how to address the transparency challenges without imposing onerous requirements on those that can least afford it, and why the implementation of many existing WTO decisions, including those with a crucial development dimension, has been slow. These issues may not be as prominent in news headlines and Geneva discussions as WTO negotiations and dispute settlement; however, if left unresolved for much longer, their impacts will be felt deeply across the multilateral trading system.

To read the original policy brief, please click here.

This policy brief was written by Sofía Baliño, Communications and Editorial Manager, Economic Law and Policy, IISD.

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