EconTech

Tyler Cowen argues that most anti-trade positions are driven by xenophobia. Dani Rodrik argues that differing rule-sets (labor laws and such) are a serious source of concern. Tyler and his co-blogger Alex respond. All of those posts are worth reading.
In my mind, this is definitely not an either-or situation. I hope that before I die [...]

I won’t bother with the full post, [Edit: Which you can find here: Trade and Inequality] but this caught my attention:
Samuelson — who btw is a Nobel Prize winner and very much a mainstream neoclassical economist — has also published an important paper which shows that, theoretically, under some (quite plausible) circumstances a productivity gain [...]

“To put it mildly, [converting food crops to biofuels] is foolish; to put it strongly, it is a crime against humanity.”
India considers ban on trading in food futures
By Raphael Minder in Madrid
India is considering a blanket ban on trading in food futures, highlighting growing concerns in Asia over the role of hedge funds and financial [...]

Beating a not-so-dead horse on food prices
A “loyal reader” writes
Martin Wolf of the FT has written a whole article arguing that: ‘… higher food prices have powerful distributional effects: they hurt the poorest the most’ without even a mention of the basic economics in your September post on food prices: ‘The real answer of course [...]

I got some complaints (why do people email, isn’t it easier to comment?) that my algebra leaved something to be desired in my previous post on this. I thought the details were rather obvious, and I left H and L as being the real expenditure for a single unit of a high and low quality [...]

Trade and inequality, revisited — Rooftops edition

Another way of investigating the relationship between inequality and trade with poor countries implies that China may actually help the poor, suggests new work from University of Chicago economists Christian Broda and John Romalis.
Instead of focusing purely on what’s produced outside of the country, Broda and Romalis turn their [...]

I’ve been working through the welfare effects of the recent policy changes in world food import/export policies in response to rising food prices. It is telling that the subject was not broached in my course on international trade, though perhaps it is more telling that the professor had never heard of trade diversion and was [...]

Growth slows, that is. Trade levels have not shrunk.
World trade decelerates almost to standstill
Global trade slowed almost to a standstill over the new year, threatening to shrink for the first time since the US economy went into recession in 2001.
An indicator produced by the Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, a Dutch research institute, showed that [...]

I find it amusing how DeLong dismisses the environmental and labor practices as obviously Good Things (TM) so quickly, when I’ve had so many professors dismiss them as obviously Bad Things (TM) just as quickly. Nevertheless, he has a good discussion that is worth reading.  My little bit of commentary will be on the obviousness [...]

I always find these surveys interesting. I usually prefer to look at ones that go in depth in a particular country and try to figure out how people think about these issues, but the cross country comparisons here are intriguing:
Slow down the world, I want to get off
 
 
There is no shortage of polls on how [...]

Dani summarizes for us:
Trade and the great divergence

Opening up to international trade raises the return to skills in advanced economies and reduces it in the less advanced ones, according to the standard factor-endowments story. If human capital accumulation in turn depends on these returns to skills, trade should enhance human capital accumulation in the rich [...]

When I first started reading and writing on inequality, one of the first conceptual issues that came up which I was unable to satisfactorily resolve was how to assign technological developments to which part of my estimates. I assumed people smarter than me had a good way of figuring this out, but never came across [...]

VoxEU continues to shine as one of the premier places to read up on interesting policy oriented research questions. This time, an analysis of the composition of the decline in pollution in U.S. manufacturing. There are open questions still, e.g. a version of this decomposition for developing countries, and how their exports drive their pollution [...]

So, the Samuelson paper was kinda weird, and I have to take exception with Mankiw’s description of it here. While the paper did show that decreased trade would reduce national welfare (of course, that uses a simple national GDP to add over all individuals in a linear manner), it showed that by saying that technological [...]

So, this whole thing started out when Sen. Clinton said that a pause on Doha may be needed to re-examine our political considerations given to trade. Despite the fact that the last few regional trade deals have been terribly constructed (can you say CAFTA?), my favorite paper jumped on the relevant part of the interview [...]