Gordon Brown's speech on the global economy yesterday contained a very interesting section on the dangers of deglobilisation (it starts at 11.30 on the video clip, if you don't want to watch the whole thing).
The traditional worry is that during tough economic times trade and investment barriers are put up - this was what the G20 leaders sought to address through a standstill clause in the G20 Washington Summit communiqué in November. The WTO has been collecting data in the interim looking at recent instances of countries raising barriers: the 'periodic reports on global trade trends' referred to by Pascal Lamy during a speech at the Department of International Development last week. The hope is that scrutiny and some powerful arguments about the negative economic and public policy impacts of traditional protectionist measures will stop them in their tracks.
A different, and more subtle, threat is of government and corporate behaviours that, taken together, have the potential to balkanize the global economy. The most stark example is in capital markets, where financial markets (often nudged this way by politicians) have retrenched to the familiarity of their home markets. In the most globilised of sectors, countries' borders matter again. Similarly, as governments put in place fiscal stimulus packages and intervene to support individual sectors, the focus will inevitably be on the domestic market. Unfortunately you can easily imagine the net effect being the partial fragmentation of the global economy without governments touching tariffs on foreign investment rules. Food for thought in the snowfields of Davos and during the run-up to the London G20 Summit in April.
Posted at 14:31 27 January 2009 by Oliver Griffiths | Comments[0]
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As we all wrestle with policy responses to the financial crisis, one of the dangers is that failings in financial regulation are somehow seen as repudiating the economic and philosophical bases of Anglo-Saxon capitalism. But we need to be careful. How to regulate structured financial products - which, at least in their recent scope, are a new phenomenon - is a very different question from whether to keep borders open to international trade. The latter is an old debate and one that free traders feel that they have won twice before - first in the UK in the 1840s and second after the second world war. Comparisons between the current times and the Great Depression are already starting to feel hackneyed. But it is worth remembering how border restrictions ushered in by the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 stemmed trade flows and deepened the recession. US exports plummeted from $5bn in 1929 to $1.6bn in 1933.
I spoke with someone from the WTO Secretariat recently about my concerns of brand contamination between the financial crisis and trade liberalisation. His view was that, since its inception, the GATT / WTO has been about setting parameters for international trade, with many painful negotiations over the appropriate rules of the multilateral trade road, rather than letting unregulated markets rip.
Trade is not going to be at the forefront of this week's G20 Summit in Washington. But it will be on the agenda. And rightly so, given the importance of maintaining open markets in propelling us out of the economic downturn. Leaders can send a strong signal - to a sceptical world and to their own sceptical bureaucracies - about the importance of locking in a deal on the Doha Development Agenda this year. Some doubt how much good another exhortation on Doha can do. However, we were tantalisingly close to a deal in July and one thing that the intervening period has impressed on me is the value of tariffs being bound in Geneva. Reducing the level of bound tariffs has real value that we overlooked when the economic going was good. It is our insurance policy against protectionism. Senator Reed Smoot and Representative Willis Hawley didn't have the restraint of the WTO.
Posted at 13:02 13 November 2008 by Oliver Griffiths | Comments[0]
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