Category: Trade

Trade for Human Rights as a Minimum Core Obligation

sfparrLeave a comment

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In his report on the Minimum Core Doctrine (MCD) John Tasioulas states:

“the essence of the concept will be taken to be the sub-set of obligations associated with socio-economic rights that must be immediately complied with in full (obligations of immediate effect)” (p. 3).

He contrasts these against those obligations that require significant resources and are therefore subject to ‘progressive realization’. Thus, the defining characteristic of MCD is that it differentiates obligations between those of immediate effect and those of progressive realization. And the focus is on the nature of the obligations (what the state must do when) rather than the nature of substantive rights (the condition of people’s lives).

However, the discussion about what constitutes minimum core obligations in substance focuses on the nature of rights enjoyment and a package of minimum goods and services that would be required rather than the nature of obligations. This starts with General Comment 3 that refers to ‘a minimum core obligation to ensure the satisfaction of, at the very least, minimum essential levels of each of the rights’, and to the provision of ‘essential primary health care’ (ICESCR quoted in Tasioulas p. 5). Further, human rights-based practice begins to specify specific types of diseases to be treated and goods and services that would be included in the minimum, as under the ‘selective primary health care model’ adopted by UNICEF (Tasioulas p. 5).Read More »

Free Trade Free for All: Market Romanticism Versus Reality

jmoududLeave a comment

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The drama surrounding President Trump’s decision to impose import tariffs on steel and aluminum has roiled the Republican Party and wide swathes of the corporate elite. The tariff decision comes on the heels of political bluster about the US being treated “unfairly” by other countries. This accusation of “unfairness” when it comes to US trade deficits is well worn. In a previous era, Japan was the alleged culprit of “unfair” trade practices because of its persistent trade surpluses with the U.S.Read More »

The BRICS and a Changing World

Sanjay G ReddyLeave a comment

This July and August, I led an international group of experts in preparing an Economic Report on the role of the BRICS countries (Brazil, China, India, Russia and South Africa) in the world economy and international development.  The Report was commissioned as an input to the Summit of BRICS countries that took place in early September 2017 in Xiamen, China.

It surveys the BRICS countries’ sizable contribution to global growth, trade and investment, evaluates the prospects for this to continue in the future, and explores the possible role that these countries can play in bolstering the global economy, in reshaping international economic arrangements and in contributing to the Sustainable Development Goals and to international development generally. An important conclusion in the report is that continued BRICS growth as well as policy initiatives can substantially benefit other developing countries (the report uses the IMF category of Emerging Market and Developing Countries, or EMDCs) – and developed countries too.  I will  be pleased if the report will be circulated widely, and welcome all reactions.Read More »

Premature Deindustrialization and the Defeminization of Labor

jpellg3 Comments

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In two previous posts on this blog, I’ve discussed the issue of premature deindustrialization and some of its possible consequences. In a recent paper, I, along with co-author Bret Anderson of Southern Oregon University, explored the potential consequences of premature deindustrialization further by examining the possible connections between premature deindustrialization and the defeminization of industrial employment. Premature deindustrialization is a situation in which the shares of manufacturing value added and employment begin to shrink at per-capita income levels much lower than those of the early industrializers, along with manufacturing employment peaking at lower levels. The scarce manufacturing jobs that do remain, however, are likely to be relatively high paying jobs that countries and workers compete for. In our work, we assessed whether premature deindustrialization is a feminizing or defeminizing force in industrial employment. By examining 62 countries from 1990 to 2013, we find that premature deindustrialization is likely to amplify the male bias of industrial upgrading.Read More »

200 Years of Ricardian Trade Theory: How Is This Still A Thing?

Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven9 Comments

maxresdefault.jpegOn Saturday, April 19th 1817, David Ricardo published The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, where he laid out the idea of comparative advantage, which since has become the foundation of neoclassical, ‘mainstream’ international trade theory. 200 years – and lots of theoretical and empirical criticism later – it’s appropriate to ask, how is this still a thing?[1]

This week we saw lots of praise of Ricardo, by the likes of The Economist, CNN, Forbes and Vox. Mainstream economists today tend to see the rejection of free trade implicit in Trump and Brexit as populist nonsense by people who don’t understand the complicated theory of comparative advantage (“Ricardo’s Difficult Idea”, as Paul Krugman once called it in his explanation of why non-economists seem to not understand comparative advantage). However, there are fundamental problems with the assumptions embedded in Ricardo’s theory and there’s little evidence, if any, to back up the Ricardian claim that free trade leads to balanced trade. On this bicentenary, I therefore think it’s timely to revisit some of the fundamental assumptions behind Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage, that should have led us to consider alternative trade theories a long time ago. Read More »

On the Journals: Western Populism and Economic Development

Ingrid Harvold KvangravenLeave a comment

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The election of Donald Trump last year and Britain voting to leave the EU (‘Brexit’) left a lot of people angry and confused. While there was a lot of in-depth media coverage trying to make sense of the phenomenon immediately after the fact, the academic analysis is as usual late to the game because of the lag associated with academic publishing

Only these past couple of months have academic articles dealing with the issue started appearing. Real World Economics Review, for example, published an excellent special issue on Trumponomics in March. Although the analysis tends to be Western-centric, there have been a few notable pieces that take a more global perspective and/or deal with economic consequences for the developing world.Read More »