- Joined
- Apr 18, 2013
- Messages
- 94,341
- Reaction score
- 82,722
- Location
- Barsoom
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Independent
With the U.S. Going Rogue, World Fumbles for New Trade Consensus
In the absence of traditional US trade leadership, other major trading players such as China and the EU will only be too happy fill the leadership vacuum.
By Andrew Mayeda and Charlie Devereux
December 9, 2017
Trade ministers will meet in Argentina with one of the traditional defenders of free markets, the U.S., questioning the benefits of the international rules it helped to forge. “Without U.S. leadership for a positive agenda, there is a clear risk that energies of WTO members could dissipate across the fragmented set of issues and that few policy proposals will advance to conclusion,” Douglas Lippoldt, chief trade economist at HSBC, said in a research note. “The U.S. is holding the WTO hostage without really stating its demands,” said Caroline Freund, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “It’s dangerous, because the dispute resolution system is one of the parts of the WTO that’s actually working.” The WTO meeting may reveal how serious the U.S. is in acting on Trump’s tough trade talk, said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, and former chief economist to the Council of Economic Advisers under George W. Bush. “This is a big moment,” said Holtz-Eakin. “This will be the first time Lighthizer sits down with a lot of his counterparts.”
China’s Commerce Minister Zhong Shan, Japanese Trade Minister Hiroshige Seko and European Union Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom are among those expected to attend the meeting, which runs Dec. 10-13. Former Argentine Foreign Minister Susana Malcorra, who is chairing the meeting, said her priority is to get member countries to acknowledge that the WTO, in spite of its imperfections, is needed to enable global trade. Any further agreements on specific topics would be an added bonus, she said in an interview. “If we manage to emerge from this meeting with a pledge for a strengthened system, then that in itself will be a great success,” Malcorra said. “It’s not so long ago that there were people who thought the system was collapsing.”
In the absence of traditional US trade leadership, other major trading players such as China and the EU will only be too happy fill the leadership vacuum.