According to a recent poll, a novice politician, J.D. Scholten, is giving long-standing incumbent Steve King a run for his money in Iowa, trailing King by one percentage point.  How is he doing it?  One of the issues Scholten is raising is the effect of corporate concentration on farmers.  Senator Cory Booker joined Scholten at an…

NAFTA 2.0 includes what many consider a novel provision:  a sunset clause.  That is, the agreement will terminate in 16 years unless all three parties agree to extend it. When the United States first proposed the concept of a sunset for the agreement, the reaction was to treat it akin to heresy.  A disagreement between…

With the conclusion of the NAFTA renegotiation, the next step in the United States is Congressional consideration.  The assumption is that the agreement will be considered pursuant to Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), and there are some questions as to whether the Administration has complied with TPA.  For example, TPA requires consultations with members “upon request,”…

To situate the ongoing debate over trade, let’s take a look at some of the key takeaways from Judith Stein’s book Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies. Stein traces the evolution of American trade policy from Nixon to Clinton, and in particular she identifies choices that were made, across successive…

The Op-Ed can be found here.

There isn’t one. Contrary to the prevailing narrative, the pain didn’t start when the United States imposed tariffs on our trading partners.  The pain started much earlier.  When, exactly, doesn’t necessarily matter, though we can focus on China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), its subsequent skirting of the rules, the WTO’s insistence on…

As the Trump Administration continues to borrow the Democratic message that globalization has left American manufacturing workers behind, some of our trade partners have chosen to retaliate by targeting American agricultural workers.  As we rightly focus on whether our farmers will be hurt, however, it is important to recall the degree to which our trade agreements…

Last month the Center for Automotive Research produced a briefing paper on the proposed changes to the NAFTA rules of origin.  An evaluation of that briefing paper can be found here.

For many Americans, the 1950s were the golden age of American history. When asked when America was great, Donald Trump pointed to the post-war era of the 1940s and 1950s.  America was the world’s unquestioned economic, political, and military power. The business of America was business. The American economy was humming as never before. The…

A previous blog explained that: the U.S. willingness to be the market of last resort has been a component critical to the functioning of the global trading system; the U.S. ability to serve as the market of last resort has been compromised by WTO overreach; and no other WTO Member seems to be willing to shoulder…

2018 seems to be the year of the Progressive trade agreement.  The Trans-Pacific Partnership has been renamed the “Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership” (CPTPP).  Canada has floated proposals in the NAFTA renegotiation that it has advertised as progressive. Why? Populists in 2016 reminded us that trade agreements are inherently not progressive.  Economic theory…

The Trump Administration has made no secret about its frustration with the World Trade Organization.  Campaign rhetoric is being channeled into policy.  The United States is single-handedly strangling the Appellate Body by blocking appointment of new members and complaining about those who are holding over past their terms.  The latest WTO ministerial resulted in no…

Earlier this month Politico reminded us that, in the talks with the Koreans about KORUS, the Trump Administration is not following the procedures set out under Trade Promotion Authority.  The theory is that the Administration doesn’t plan to change U.S. law, no Congressional vote is required, and thus TPA isn’t applicable. So far so good. …

The last blog pierced the China meme – the premise that we need to do trade deals with countries in order to keep China at bay.  But if trade deals with other countries aren’t the way to deal with competitive threats from China, what is? Part of the problem is that trade people look at…

The go-to talking point when a trade agreement is in trouble in the United States is to invoke the specter of China.  When TPP began to falter, the rallying cry for passage was that if we failed to seal the deal, China would score a win, not just commercially, but geopolitically as well.  At the…

On October 19, 2017, USTR announced that imports of Peruvian wood from the exporter Inversiones Oroza would be banned.  Notably, the ban isn’t being executed pursuant to environmental laws such as the Lacey Act – it’s being executed pursuant to an annex to the U.S.-Peru Trade Partnership Agreement.  That agreement gives the United States the…

Is short-termism on its way out? Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post has posited as much, in the wake of the departure of one CEO after another from White House advisory councils after the Charlottesville protests. He argues that this event is likely to be looked back upon as a turning point in the evolution…

The House Ways and Means Trade Subcommittee invited submissions in connection with its hearing on modernizing NAFTA. This is the Executive Summary of American Phoenix’s comments.  The full comments can be found here.    In the past year, the backlash against globalization has expressed itself through Brexit, the withdrawal of the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership,…

The debate over trade policy seems to lead to only two possible views:  on one side, trade is responsible for the decline of the American middle class; on the other, trade is always beneficial, regardless of the rules.  Each side has a pejorative label for the other, so that we live in a world where…