Open markets

What should be done to maintain open markets and promote an environmentally sound recovery?

Commentaries

  • The Doha endgame and the future of the WTO

    Claude Barfield, 19 January 2009

    On December 12, the WTO’s Doha negotiations collapsed. More accurately, trade negotiators from the member states finally acknowledged what had been evident for months –the substantive divisions on central issues were too deep and the political will too puny to bridge the gaps. In recent weeks, there have been frantic calls for quick action to restart the negotiating process. That...

  • Green stimulus: Fix the power grid

    Gilbert E. Metcalf, 23 January 2009

    In a recent speech at George Mason University, US President Barack Obama said he wanted to build a “smart” electric grid that would deliver “clean, alternative forms of energy to every corner of our nation.” This is one element in the new administration's larger plan to increase renewable sources’ share of electricity production to 10% by 2012 and 25% by 2025. The...

  • Keeping borders open during the global downturn: What are the options?

    Simon J Evenett, 25 January 2009

    No one blames international trade in goods and services, supply chains and outsourcing, and migration for getting the world economy into its current state, but that doesn't mean that any profound policy shift away from open borders won't have systemic consequences. In the short- to medium-term such reversal could affect the depth of the recession and the speed of any eventual recovery. Over the...

  • Ending the crisis without starting another: A “green” global recovery

    Trevor Houser, 27 January 2009

    At the G20 meeting last November, the world’s leading economies agreed to combat global recession with coordinated fiscal stimulus. Given the scale of the challenge – and the amount of money that will be used to address it – economic recovery efforts are monopolising national legislative agendas and promising to strain state coffers. Policymakers are hoping to direct government...

  • The challenges of trade financing

    Marc Auboin, 28 January 2009

    Part of the collapse of world trade is due to problems with trade credit financing. Since statistics on this are scare, it is impossible to be precise about the most immediately salient and challenging feature of the financial crisis from a trade perspective – the supply of trade finance. Trade credit financing Trade finance is at the low-risk, high collateral end of the credit spectrum but...

  • Currency “manipulation” and world trade: Three reasons for caution

    Robert W. Staiger, Alan O. Sykes, 30 January 2009

    The Chinese yuan was pegged from 1994 until mid-2005 at 8.28 yuan to the US dollar. China shifted in 2005 to a policy of loosely pegging the yuan to a basket of major currencies. Since then the yuan has appreciated against the dollar, and the current yuan/dollar exchange rate stands at roughly 6.84. Over the same period, the yuan generally depreciated against the euro, falling from 10.06 in June...

  • Buy American is bad for America (and everyone else)

    Gary Clyde Hufbauer, Jeffrey J. Schott, 5 February 2009

    On January 28, 2009, the US House of Representatives passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Out of the bill's 700 text pages, a small half-page section attracted enormous media attention: the section requiring that all public projects funded by the stimulus plan must use only iron and steel produced in the US. The US Senate draft, which is being debated in Washington this week...

  • Don't let murky protectionism stall a global recovery: Things the G20 should do

    Richard Baldwin, Simon J Evenett, 5 March 2009

    Trade seems to have has slipped far down the G20 leaders list of priorities. The new ebook, “The collapse of global trade, murky protectionism, and the crisis: Recommendations for the G20,” argues that this is a mistake. Trade is experiencing a sudden, severe and globally synchronised collapse (see Figure 1). Protectionist forces have already emerged and will strengthen as the...

  • The London Summit: Open markets and trade finance

    Vicky Pryce, 2 April 2009

    The London Summit took place at a time when global trade is falling at the fastest rate since the Second World War. The WTO is now forecasting world trade to decline by as much as 9% in 2009, driven by falling global demand and a shortage of trade finance. By one set of estimates, the volume of world trade fell month-on-month by 5% in November 2008, 7% in December 2008, and a further 7% in...

  • Trade and the London Summit outcome

    Richard Baldwin, 4 April 2009

    The London Communiqué confirms that issues surrounding international trade have moved up the G20 agenda. The commitments made could have been much stronger, but I believe that what was agreed on protectionism can be graded as “not bad”. On the Doha Round, the Summit’s pledge was pitiful – it should be graded “very sad”. Yet, given the current disarray in...

  • A tale of two depressions: What do the new data tell us? February 2010 update

    Barry Eichengreen, Kevin H O’Rourke, 6 April 2009

    Editor's Note: This column updates the original Vox columns by Barry Eichengreen and Kevin O’Rourke comparing today’s global financial crisis to the Great Depression. The previous columns have shattered all Vox readership records with over 450,000 views (O’Rourke and Eichengreen 2009). The latest data cover up to February 2010, the original April 2009 column and the subsequent...

  • Global markets: what they are indicating?

    Sri Kumar Aduri Freelance Macroeconomic policy researcher, 21 January 2012

    The global markets are heading for an interesting time in 2012. We may notice, the indices experience heightened volatility within certain ranges. The upside opportunities arise from the oil price hikes etc and the results of relentless cost cutting by organizations. Oil price rise means short term profits for oil producers and nation states that are hydrocarbon driven. The profits made out of...

  • Financial Innovation to power growth in a debt ridden market environment

    Sri Kumar Aduri Freelance Macroeconomic policy researcher, 6 September 2011

    Governments borrowed and spent (Bail outs included) to deal with the financial crises in 2008 – 09. Naturally that level additional debt on states with debt level around 100% of GDP has resulted in a debt crisis. Now the Austerity is followed to manage. However with several million jobs and pension losses and with the austerity measures, economic growth expectations in the short term should...

  • The SDR solution

    Michael Pomerleano The World Bank, 5 May 2011

      There is universal agreement that the international monetary system (IMS) needs reform. All of us understand the benefits of avoiding the Triffin Dilemma by reforming the international financial system. The present system, dominated by reserves holdings of US dollars, places an unsustainable burden of creating reserves on the US. While the US enjoys the "exorbitant privilege" of...

  • Inflation and Global Systemic Liquidity implications for markets:

    Sri Kumar Aduri Freelance Macroeconomic policy researcher, 8 March 2011

    With the Chinese wage rise and commodities price jump, we have inflationary environment in China. Commodity price rise is a major threat to global economic recovery as well. Countries like Japan who have 40% dependency on trade with China will be affected. So will be the EU with USD 400Bn trade and US with 380Bn. However the most interesting situation is between China and Japan. In Japan, we have...

  • The European restructuring should not be “too” easy *

    Michael Pomerleano The World Bank, 20 December 2010

      A chorus of respected analysts is voicing pessimism about the future of the euro and the European Union. Dani Rodrik writes about Thinking the Unthinkable in Europe. Barry Eichengreen comments on Europe’s Inevitable Haircut. Daniel Gros, in Big bang or endless crisis? argues for a big-bang solution to the eurozone’s problems. Ken Rogoff in The Euro at Mid-Crisis outlines an...

  • Spend Green Today, Tax Green in the Future

    Jeffrey Frankel Harvard, 7 February 2009

    Politicians are often tempted to think that a policy to help one goal, say air quality, must also help lots of other goals, say economic growth.  Economists are more likely to presume tradeoffs, and to use the principle of targets and instruments.  That principle says that you cannot expect to hit more than one bird with one stone, except by coincidence. At the American...

  • What to do about Doha

    6 March 2009

    The Doha Round will soon officially become Geneva’s longest running show, surpassing the languid Uruguay Round (9/86-4/94). There are a lot of reasons why the pace of the talks has been so slow, but clearly the central focus on agriculture, and the demand by many WTO members that progress on agriculture was a prerequisite for movement in other areas, has held back progress across the...

  • Prime time for the WTO: Let’s use what we have and stop proposing new plans

    28 January 2009

    There is no doubt that we are entering into un-chartered territory: the brutal end of the “too good to be true” period of global finance has sent shock waves to the world economy with no part of the world being decoupled from the economic slowdown. The resulting reduction in global demand has swiftly affected trade volumes and is now yielding its toll on employment. With clear...

  • US lawmakers should choose hope over fear, and stick with free trade

    7 March 2009

    Free trade is a child of economic confidence; protectionism is pessimism's progeny. In today's fearful economic climate, policy makers have again cried "buy American" and embraced interventions that support domestic producers at the expense of our trading partners. Protectionism is bad economics and worse foreign policy, for many of our trading partners have only a tenuous link to...

  • Resource nationalism: A sign of conflicts to come?

    15 March 2009

    Remember last spring? It seems an age ago now. The fear then was of resource scarcity: of rising oil prices, and of rising food prices, as biofuels crowded out food production and population continued to grow. Environmental worries also reflect resource scarcity, albeit of another type. Once this crisis is over, whenever that is, all these concerns will inevitably come back on the agenda, and...

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