Oliver Griffiths

Glass three quarters full or one quarter empty?

There is a great article by Richard Baldwin looking at the debate over the offshoring of services jobs. The article looks at the other side of Alan Blinder's estimate that 30 to 40 million American services jobs will become offshoreable as new technology makes possible international trade in services that were previously firmly located in one place. 

The one take-away that has stuck with me from Blinder's widely-read Foreign Affairs article from 2006 is that if you want to avoid international trade, consider a career as a personal trainer. Baldwin points out that the US is rather good at providing services and runs a significant trade surplus - and that the opening up of service sectors to international competition actually offers mutually-enhancing opportunities. It's an argument that our Ambassador's recent trade speech in Baltimore concluded with.

Posted at 13:38 22 June 2009 by Oliver Griffiths  |  Comments[0]

Trade The Day After Tomorrow

As trailed in my last posting, here is the link to Demetrios Marantis's comments to Monday's conference in London at the start of World Trade Week UK. It has a particular emphasis on making trade work for Least Developed Countries. You can also view Lord Mandelson's opening speech, which includes the launch of a new Global Trade Alert designed to help with the monitoring of government responses to the recession. There will be a launch of the Global Trade Alert in Washington at the German Marshall Fund toward the end of the month. 

Separately our Ambassador appeared on the Fox Business Network this morning in a discussion on protectionism (prompting my discovery at 7 am that the Fox Business Network does not feature among the more than 300 channels that Verizon pipes into my home).  Sometimes you don't know what you're missing.

I liked the op-ed from the President of the Federated Farmers in New Zealand which appeared in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week putting the spotlight on the reintroduction on dairy export subsidies in the US. Of course the EU has, equally regrettably, done something similar. All of which underlines the value of eliminating agricultural export subsidies as part of an overall Doha deal, as agreed at the WTO Ministerial meeting in Hong Kong in December 2005. I remember how the EU offer to get rid of export subsidies was talked down at the time as the EU getting maximum value for a diminishing negotiating asset, on the basis that the subsidies were being phased out anyway. The last year has reminded us that trade policy is not a simple (if slow) teleology towards a tariff-free and subsidy-free world and that there is real value in binding in disciplines, whether on subsidies or tariffs, at the WTO.

On the same theme, the Foresight Horizon Scanning Centre in the UK's Government Office of Science has produced a paper setting out four scenarios for world trade between now and 2020. It looks at trade within the broader context of differing degrees of resource abundance and differing degrees of international co-ordination over the next decade. We have been thinking up movie title alternatives for the four scenarios. The two dystopian ones are relatively easy: 'Fragile Alliances' reads like Bladerunner (Traderunner?), 'Deglobalisation' is 1984. The remaining two are harder. The whole concept of the 'Global Citizen' has a Star Trek feel it to.  The response to the 2015 climate disaster in the 'Global Innovation' scenario perhaps makes it The Day After Tomorrow.

Posted at 17:04 10 June 2009 by Oliver Griffiths  |  Comments[0]

World Trade Week UK

This week sees the inaugural World Trade Week UK, which aims to highlight the importance of global trade in creating jobs and growth during these difficult economic times. It’s an idea that draws heavily on FDR’s 1933 initiative to designate the third week of May as National Foreign Trade Week, following up on the promise in his Inaugural Address to ‘spare no effort to restore world trade by international economic readjustment’. Actually it is surprising to look at the full text of FDR’s language on international trade in the Inaugural Address, where he sees international trade relations as secondary to national economic recovery - as if the two are somehow separate challenges. 

In advance of World Trade Week UK our Ambassador, Nigel Sheinwald, gave a major speech on trade in Baltimore last week. The speech underlines our on-going concerns about the risks of the global economy being compartmentalised into national boxes.  To take one example, we have been hearing from a number of British companies worried about how the Buy American provisions in the fiscal stimulus are being applied. Under the terms of the Congressional legislation, British companies and goods should not be affected by Buy American in most states because the UK has signed the Government Procurement Agreement.  However it seems that many local decision-makers think that they heard Congress say ‘Buy American. Period.’ As the speech sets out, we have no Buy British equivalent in government procurement rules in the UK and American companies get a substantial portion of government contracts. 

There will be a major international conference on trade in London this week, featuring, among others, Paul Krugman, Jagdish Bhagwati, Lord Mandelson and EU Trade Commissioner Cathy Ashton. Friday afternoon we taped an address by Deputy USTR Demetrios Marantis to the conference. 

It will then be interesting to see the US’s trade data for April which comes out on Tuesday. There were some signs of recovering transatlantic trade volumes in the March data - though the only press angle seemed to be the on-going obsession with the size of the trade deficit. Let’s hope for some more green shoots. 

Posted at 10:10 08 June 2009 by Oliver Griffiths  |  Comments[0]

Cycling to Africa

This posting is a little different from my others - but I only really have one thing on my mind at the moment.

Trade routes have always exchanged more than goods. You visit Venice and see the architectural influences of the east. There are also serendipitous effects from trade. For example all modern varieties of apples can be traced back to one region of Kazakhstan, through which the Silk Route ran. Seeds from apples stuffed in pockets or left in manure slowly spread the fruit to Europe. There is an excellent chapter on this in Roger Deakin's seductively mellow book Wildwood.

But trade also has less benign effects. The Black Death in fourteenth century Europe, which killed up to 60% of the population, was brought in along the caravan routes from Asia. And within Africa over the past generation HIV/AIDS spread down trade corridors, with devastating impacts on communities.

On Saturday morning, Simon Shercliff, a friend and fellow Embassy blogger, started a 1,000 mile bike ride from Washington to Africa ... Africa, Indiana, that is ... to raise money for a community in Southern Tanzania badly hit by HIV/AIDS. We have set up a website, which provides lots more information about the ride and our charity, Orphans In The Wild. We'll be doing a daily blog of our experiences as we cross Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky, where I will be able to report on the effectiveness of Assos Chamois Cream.

Posted at 00:13 04 May 2009 by Oliver Griffiths  |  Comments[1]

March Madness

As March Madness reaches its crescendo, I have been trying to work out why college sports are so popular here. The only student sporting event that gets any major media attention is the annual Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, which was held last Sunday. By contrast, US college basketball and football gets wall-to-wall TV coverage. The best explanation I've heard is that professional basketball and football only took off in post-war America, allowing the college games to build a following that they have kept. Had the Football League not been formed in 1888, British workplaces could now be filled with team brackets ahead of the university football cup. 

It is interesting what sports can tell you about a country. I have been intrigued by the contrast between the Premiership (the top football league in England) and the NFL - and what it might say about attitudes to competition and foreign investment. These are not the things that you capture in the classic measures such as the World Bank's Doing Business report. 

You might reasonably expect the NFL to epitomise testosterone-fuelled competition. But it feels like 1950s dirigism next to the Premiership's Gilded Age capitalism. For one thing, there is promotion and relegation between leagues in the UK: come in the bottom three and you go down a league. If you have a bad season in the NFL you live to fight another season.

Another difference is that different teams win the Super Bowl. Unfettered capitalism leads to monopoly, yes? Only three teams have won the Premiership since 1995. In the past three seasons (and probably this season) the same four teams in the Premiership finished in the first four positions. There is remarkably little criticism about this. In the NFL the worst teams get to pick the best college players. There's none of that redistribution in the Premiership.

And where does the money come from? Of the top four Premiership teams, Americans majority own Liverpool and Manchester United, a Russian owns Chelsea, with a US-Russian bidding war rumoured for Arsenal. This state of affairs is not universally popular. But it's hard to envisage foreign ownership of the biggest NFL franchises in the first place.

Life can mirror sport. The success of the City of London since the Big Bang has been characterised as the Wimbledon effect: great tournament, few great domestic players. You see the same approach in Sunday's Boat Race. Undergraduates and postgraduates competed freely for places in the crews. The closest US equivalents - the Harvard-Yale race or the Eastern Sprints - are restricted to undergraduates. The result is an Oxford crew with an average age of 25 and five Olympians on board racing a Cambridge crew with an average age of 24. But it makes for great, multinational crews, from which the relatively few British participants that make the grade consistently step up to the very successful British Olympic rowing programme. And, having the same two crews each year, it also makes for easier bracket predictions.

Posted at 11:46 06 April 2009 by Oliver Griffiths  |  Comments[0]

Trade at the London Summit

One of the headline aims for the London Summit on 2 April is to put the world on track for sustainable growth. Central to this aim will be reiterating the importance of open markets to the economic recovery (a point made by the Prime Minister in his address to Congress last week) and addressing the threat of protectionism. 

The communique from the G20 Summit in Washington contained useful standstill language on protectionist measures, with leaders agreeing to 'refrain from raising new barriers to investment or to trade in goods and services, imposing new export restrictions, or implementing WTO inconsistent measures to stimulate exports.' Most G20 countries have kept to the spirit of the pledge. Uri Dadush at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has this week made a number of policy recommendations for trade at the coming Summit.

There has been some interesting debate about what constitutes protectionism, as this voxeu piece looking at 'murky protectionism' highlights. Many governments have taken necessary and unprecedented domestic action to stimulate their economies.  However the impact of this patchwork of bailouts and stimulus packages on international trade flows is not always clear. There is a clear onus on governments to bear in mind the dangers of behind-the-border protectionism.  

The London Summit will be looking for a recommitment to keep away from the edge of the protectionist abyss and to ensure that effective monitoring mechanisms are put in place. For a thought-provoking piece on the role that the US Administration could play on trade at the London Summit, see this article in the Wall Street Journal.

For those in Washington, Dominick Chilcott, Deputy Head of Mission at the British Embassy, will be speaking at a roundtable hosted by the German Marshall Fund at 12.30 on Friday 13th March on the topic of 'The London Summit and the Fight against Protectionism'. Please contact Mark Allegrini on mallegrini@gmfus.org if you would like to attend - though beware that space is limited.

Posted at 11:10 12 March 2009 by Oliver Griffiths  |  Comments[0]

American attitudes to trade

I have been looking at the recent Gallup poll on trade. The interesting story to write on US public attitudes to trade is that support is falling off a cliff and the US is about to pull up the gangplank to global trade. So the Gallup headline - 'Americans more negative than positive about foreign trade' - writes itself. But I have a couple of observations on the data which do not fit well within the narrative of a calamitous and unprecedented collapse in US support for trade: first, this year's figures (47% seeing trade as an opportunity, 44% as a threat) are almost exactly the same as in President Clinton's first year (46% and 44% respectively); second, support for trade improved significantly between 2007 and 2008, from negative 11 to negative 3. As an aside, it is also worth noting the exquisite mercantilist framing of the question: 'do you see foreign trade more ... as an opportunity for economic growth through increased American exports or a threat to the economy from foreign imports'. Under this formulation, bananas and coffee beans - both barely produced in the US - are somehow an economic threat. The logical conclusion of the question is that the best thing for the US is to export as much as possible and import nothing, which is a self-evident nonsense.

But it is notable how international trade, which is seen as being at the centre of 'Anglo-Saxon capitalism', has so little support in the US compared to other countries. The US public is consistently among the most suspicious of the effects of trade. See, for example, page 19 of the Pew Global Attitudes survey from last June, where US support for trade stood at 55%, compared to 79% in France (a country which is often rolled out as being instinctively anti-trade). Quite why US support for international trade is so low is a puzzle. Has America, which maintained high tariffs throughout the nineteenth century, retained a Hamiltonian appreciation for the benefits of protection - in which case, why have other countries which followed a similar developmental pattern not? Has trade had more baleful impacts on the US economy than on others - in which case, why has this effect been felt most keenly in the US, with a ratio of trade volume to GDP much lower than most other developed countries? Is free trade tainted by being a relatively partisan issue in Washington - in which case, why is there so little distance between the views of those polled who identify themselves as Democrat or Republican? Do supporters of international trade talk the wrong language - in which case, how has the dialogue been so different in other countries? Is it because employers provide many benefits provided by the state in other countries, making the loss of a job more traumatic - in which case, why is it international trade, which is estimated to cause under 5% of American job losses (and create many more), that bears so much of the criticism? I think this is a fascinating topic.

Professor Doug Irwin notes that before the second world war most self-respecting US Congressmen prefaced comments on international trade with the proviso 'I'm not a free trader but ...' and that this switched during the 1950s to 'I'm not a protectionist but ...'. I think and hope that we are some way from the first proviso coming back into fashion (though the last few months have shaken the firmness of my conviction on that). In that regard the Gallup poll is relatively reassuring.

Posted at 10:35 05 March 2009 by Oliver Griffiths  |  Comments[5]

Our new website

As the most tech-savvy political operation most of us have seen takes up the reins of government in Washington, there is rightly a lot of interest in how the Obama Administration will use the internet. FDR was the first American President to use the radio effectively. JFK was the first to appreciate the power of TV. Will BHO be the first to really harness the internet as a tool of government? The potential is enormous, of course. And it goes well beyond sending emails and posting clips on YouTube. The internet is a two-way, indeed multi-way, technology, which could theoretically take us back towards a more direct form of democracy by allowing debate and conversations across any size of political unit. Will we witness a re-birth of democracy in a virtual Athens? What chance wiki-style policy making? But first will be the collision with government IT systems and security requirements - for example, see the claims that President Obama's blackberry could be hacked. And I say this from the perspective of someone who uses Windows 98 at work.

Anyway, we can be sure that there will be some excellent websites, judging from the revamped White House site. We wanted to do our bit as well, so we have launched a section on trade and globalisation on the ukinusa website. It is still early days, but our ambition is to create something that will be more than just a portal for dull government documents. We'd like it to be a useful resource and an interesting, thought-provoking read. An Aide for Trade if you will. So please have a look around and let me know what you think.

Posted at 13:04 17 February 2009 by Oliver Griffiths  |  Comments[0]

Deglobalisation

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]

Why Doha. Why Now.

After nearly five years working on the latest round of WTO negotiations – the Doha Development Agenda - I thought I had seen every possible typo connected with the Qatari capital. Not so. A recent email produced the most amusing so far: the ‘Dodo Round’. Some would argue that is an apt description. They'd argue that Doha is a negotiation that has failed to get off the ground or evolve since its launch in 2001 to address today’s problems and is heading for extinction.  Some see Doha destined to become a historical curio like the famous flightless bird of Mauritius – the only multilateral trade round since the launch of the GATT in 1948 to fail to conclude. 

But the Dodo is making a comeback. Pressure is building for a meeting of Ministers in Geneva within the next two weeks, designed to agree a deal on agriculture and industrial goods. The reaction on the Hill and in the DC trade community? “Yeah right”. But Washington has consistently been down on the Doha Round. In July before the last Doha Ministerial meeting, few in Washington gave the meeting any chance of success, at the same time as the European Commission’s chief agriculture negotiator was buying a box of cigars to share around in Geneva in anticipation of an agreement. The result? A tantalizing near-miss in Geneva - and shock in Washington that a deal had so nearly been done. 

July now seems a lifetime away. We have been through a financial and economic maelstrom. The Dow at the end of July stood at 11,500.  It is now at 8,500. Since then Leaders at both the G20 and APEC summits have put their weight behind a Doha deal this year. The political wind is now behind the negotiation. This has elicited warnings to the US Administration both from business groups and Congress to hold firm and press other countries harder. So it is worth recalling five reasons why we all need this deal and need it now. 

First. A deal will give a boost to the global economy during difficult times measured in hundreds of billions of dollars.  Pascal Lamy, the WTO Director-General, argues that the deal on the table is worth considerably more than the Uruguay Round. Yes, its impact could have been bigger and we need to keep pressing for ambition. Yes, its effects won’t be instantaneous. But it is well worth having. And systemic arguments for a deal are even stronger than any dollar-and-cent valuation of new market access.  

Second, it will bind tariffs at low levels. At the moment there is often a significant gap between bound and applied tariffs.  Getting rid of that differential has real value. The provisional result of a study by the International Food Policy Research Institute is that the difference in trade volume between completing a Doha deal and countries putting tariffs back up to bound levels would be $2,110 bn. To put that figure in context, the total US trade volume (imports and exports) last year was $3,100 bn. Binding tariffs is the insurance policy against tariffs sliding back up – which is a real risk in today’s economic climate.

Third. A deal will cement the status of the WTO. The current financial crisis has underlined the need for effective global governance.  The WTO isn’t perfect but in many ways it is an exemplar for other international institutions. India and Brazil sit shoulder to shoulder with the EU and US in the inner negotiating groups. Each WTO Member has a real stake. The WTO allows countries to either negotiate or litigate away problems. If the negotiation channel fails, how viable is the WTO? 

Fourth. If not now, when? Why are the chances of a deal any better in, say, two years’ time? The word from Geneva is that we have got about as far as we can get at a technical level. What are left are the big political calls. International deals get done because of political attention and leadership. We have it now.   

Fifth. What happens if we don’t do a deal? A proliferation of free trade agreements. The worst distortions in the global trading system, such as agricultural subsidies, won’t be touched. And the poorest counties – for whom this round was started – pay the price.

Posted at 16:37 05 December 2008 by Oliver Griffiths  |  Comments[0]

Santa, Elves and Comparative Advantage

One of the great things about autumn in the US as a parent of young children is the steady flow of diversions. October is all about the lead up to Halloween. November is all about Thanksgiving. December is all about the holidays. So, as we approach the end of November, the kids' questions about Santa Claus are just round the corner.

As everyone knows, Santa Claus has helpful elves that make all the presents for all the children around the world, for Santa to distribute on one frantic chimney-to-chimney delivery. This raises several problems, including why a number of the presents my children will receive will have 'Made in USA' or 'Made in China' printed on them. I think I have the answer to this particular problem: it's comparative advantage.

I have no doubt that Santa's elves could make anything and I assume that they could make it all better and cheaper than anyone else. They have absolute advantage in producing all goods. But does it follow that it makes sense for them to produce all the presents that Santa will give out? In a word, no.

The elves will be much better at making some things than anybody else (let's say wooden trains), but they will be only a little better than other people at producing other things (let's say board games and chocolate). The elves have a comparative advantage in producing wooden trains. If they specialise in producing wooden trains, they can trade the excess production - which everyone else will value highly because they can't do it as well - for lots of board games and chocolate that they can make better, but only a little better, than other producers. Specialisation in goods where they have comparative advantage will be far more efficient. It will take the elves less time to put together the full order list for Santa, allowing them more time to enjoy the Northern Lights. And it will provide an explanation for why the chocolate in the stocking will have 'Made in the USA' printed on it.  

It may sound inconsequential but it is a powerful - and comforting - real-world conclusion. Is China going to end up manufacturing everything? No. Is Brazil going to dominate global markets for all agricultural produce? No.

Comparative advantage was first set out by Robert Torrens in an essay on the Corn Laws in 1815. It concluded that Britain - at the time the emerging 'workshop of the world' - should buy wheat from Poland, even if a bushel could be produced cheaper in Britain than Poland. David Ricardo then took the plaudits for comparative advantage in his Principles of Political Economy in 1817. For a good contemporary exploration of comparative advantage, see Tim Harford's fun Undercover Economist.

Posted at 09:30 25 November 2008 by Oliver Griffiths  |  Comments[6]

Trade at the G20 Summit

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]

Counterfeits and crack pipes

I am just back from a study tour looking at the enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPR) in LA. This was a mix of the old (a bust on a stall in Santee Alley selling fake Chanel bags) and the new (talking to the studios about how they plan to compete with peer-to-peer file sharing).

I'm not sure if it was because the tour was organised by the French Embassy but fake Chanel bags ended up being a theme of the trip. We witnessed boxes of Chanel fakes (including some baseball caps whose bad taste would cause heart attacks at Chanel Design Central) being opened by Customs and Border Protection agents at the LA-Long Beach port complex. The scale of the challenge they face is immense - the port handles 5 million containers annually, which represent 45% of the US total and are worth $350 billion in two-way trade flows. To put that figure in context, it is roughly the same as total EU imports of goods into the US last year. Roughly $70 million of counterfeit merchandise was intercepted at the port last year. The most seized item? Shoes from China.

Two other themes were the diversification of counterfeited goods and the increasing participation of organised crime. The attractions of counterfeiting are that margins can be big and the punishment tends to be probation rather than jail time (I suppose reflecting a misguided societal view that IPR infringement is a victimless crime). It's an issue that we're taking very seriously in the UK. To take one example, our Fake Free London initiative aims for London to be free of counterfeits by the 2012 Olympics. But of all the items on display in LA, the one that caught my eye was not a straight counterfeit at all: a (working) branded hi-liter pen concealing a crack pipe.

The IPR challenge to the entertainment industry is well documented. The Motion Picture Association reckon that piracy led to a $18 billion of lost revenue for the industry in 2005. This is about much more than dodgy DVDs (though, incidently, the MPA reckon that it takes pirates about 13 hours from infringement to having mass-produced counterfeit DVDs on sale). Fast, cheap broadband access is one of the great benefits of our age - but also a real headache for the studios. They are looking to work with ISPs to address endemic peer-to-peer file sharing. The agreement between rights-holders and ISPs brokered by the UK government earlier this year is one promising approach - we are currently consulting on legislative options to address illicit P2P file sharing as well. The studios are also looking to compete with pirates in the content market, through products such as high quality video on demand. As a technology late-adopter, video on demand will be relevant for me in about 2015.

Posted at 14:07 30 October 2008 by Oliver Griffiths  |  Comments[1]

Moral markets

It is a fairly reliable rule of thumb that a financial crisis will be blamed on greed. But the enormity of the current challenges has led some people to signpost this as the high-water mark of this particular tide of globalization (see Irwin Stelzer's argument) that the era of free trade has ended) and question the future of capitalism itself.

President Sarkozy's recent speech on the financial crisis has received a fair amount of interest. It did not feel to me like the broadside against capitalism that some have portrayed it, although there was some therapeutic knocking down of straw-men: 'the idea of the all-powerful market which wasn't to be impeded by any rules or political intervention was a mad one'. It would indeed be a mad idea, which is why we have lots of rules (including a legal code) and regulations (even if they didn't work very well in some cases) to channel markets. The part that has received most attention was President Sarkozy's assertion that 'if we want to rebuild a viable financial system, raising the moral standards of financial capitalism is a priority'.

The idea of moralising the market is an idea as old as the hills, of course. During a crisis it is a natural step on from talking about regulation (which, let's face it, is pretty dull). Regulation changes the duties and incentives faced by a company. At its purist, moralisation aims to change the motivations of the people working in the company. But it hasn't been very successful.

Defenders of free markets argue that moralisation isn't necessary and could do harm. Adam Smith famously said that 'it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard for their own interest'. But Smith was by no means the first in the game. Perhaps the most notorious rebuke of moralizers was written by Bernard Mandeville, a Dutchman living in London during the birth of modern finance. His Fable of the Bees, written to rile the self-explanatory Society for the Reformation of Manners, argued that it was private vice itself that led to public economic benefits. A libertine kept an array of tailors and innkeepers in business in a way that a church-going spinster did not. You can draw a straight line from Mandeville to Gordon Gekko. Greed is good.

The interesting middle ground is moralizing the mission of the company. Free marketers argue that profits are a company's good works for society and companies trying to deliver public interests will be distracted from their core business. But there is mounting evidence that consumer dollars are interested in the social responsibility footprint of individual companies. So far this - to borrow shamelessly from Google's logo - seems primarily to be on the basis that a company should do no evil. So multinationals have queued up to manufacture in Cambodia because of the ILO's excellent Better Factory Cambodia initiative. If it says 'Made in Cambodia' on the label, you can be fairly certain as a consumer there was no child labour involved. The Kimberley Process, established in 2003 and covering 99% of rough diamond trade, is another good example: you don't want a conflict diamond to be forever. The next step up the ethics chain is to buy from a company because it does good. Consumers may start to reward more systematically companies that get out ahead on addressing climate change, for example.

Going back to Sarkozy's aim of raising moral standards in financial capitalism, I wonder whether corporate social responsibility has had less bottom-line traction among financial services companies than in other sectors of the economy. There have been a few virtue funds launched (though also some counter-veiling vice funds). Some entities run ethical investment policies.  But they feel like a vanishingly small minority. In policy terms, the proxy we seem to have hit on for raising moral standards in banks is to oversee executive remuneration.

Posted at 09:40 20 October 2008 by Oliver Griffiths  |  Comments[0]

Carbon of Origin

Peter Mandelson made a short speech on trade and climate change in Oslo recently that is well worth a read. A couple of things sprang to mind for me.

In the first paragraph of the speech there's an (unconscious?) echo of one of Adam Smith's best quotes. Mandelson said: "A tomato grown and shipped to Europe from Senegal produces less carbon than a tomato grown in an artificially-heated greenhouse in Europe". Compare that to Smith in the Wealth of Nations: "By means of glasses, hotbeds and hotwalls, very good grapes can be raised in Scotland, and very good wine too can be made of them at about 30 times the expense for which at least equally good can be brought from foreign countries. Would it be a reasonable law to prohibit the importation of all foreign wines, merely to encourage the making of Claret and Burgundy in Scotland?" In defence of the carbon footprint of 18th century Scottish glasshouses, they were probably only solar powered.

It must be the case that a positive trade policy, based on liberalising markets for low carbon technologies, can help in addressing climate change. A negative trade policy designed to punish international free riders is more problematic. There is rightly a lot of interest in the idea of border adjustment measures, not least because the US Congress currently seems so set on the idea. Setting aside the issue of how compatible border adjustments would be with WTO rules (see a debate here if you're interested), any adjustment mechanism would be very difficult - and consequently costly - to operate. In practical terms, with the globalisation of supply chains and individual products now containing parts sourced from many countries, such measures would be a nightmare to implement. They are also likely to produce incentives to game the system. If you thought preferential rules of origin were complex, just you wait until carbon of origin. 

It also feels like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. It may be axiomatic for some people that US cap and trade legislation without border protection would lead to whole swathes of US industry being wiped out by (especially Chinese) competition. But this hasn't been the experience in the EU under the Emissions Trading Scheme. And the evidence is that cap and trade legislation would have a strictly limited impact in the US too. That's not to belittle the impact on a couple of sectors - but there must be better ways to deal with the problem than overarching border defence. Some free permits perhaps?

My personal nightmare is that if we fail to complete the Doha Round in the near future, one tricky multilateral negotiation cross-fertilises with another tricky multilateral negotiation in the shape of the post-2012 climate change framework. That way madness lies.

Posted at 09:06 09 October 2008 by Oliver Griffiths  |  Comments[3]