EconWatch.com > Kash Mansouri Is Very Unhappy with the Economist on Bush on Trade

[Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal] Furthermore, the Doha Round (the round of multilateral trade negotiations that is intended to finally take serious steps toward helping the developing world) is "on life support" in no small measure because the Bush administration has never seriously tried to make it work, instead focusing on small bilateral agreements that make no difference to anyone in the US except for a few individual corporations. And there are good theoretical reasons to think that a bunch of small bilateral trade deals may actually make it harder to conduct multilateral trade negotiations, putting a world-wide level playing field further out of reach than ever before.

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http://www.blackwell-synergy.com [Blackwell-synergy.com] Multilateral, Regional and Bilateral Trade-Policy Options for the ...: (2001), 'ASEAN Free-Trade Area Discussions on Including China, Japan, and South Korea,' International Economic Review (United States International .

Aph.gov.au[Aph.gov.au] The 2003 APEC Bangkok meetings and President Bush's East Asia visit: An issue of significant current concern to the East Asia region overall is the potential for tension in US-China economic relations.  China’s rapid economic growth and growing competitiveness in many areas of manufacturing has helped increase its penetration of the US market.  The US has a large trade deficit with China (Oxford Analytica, United States: Trade Deficit with China Record High, 12 September 2003) and it has been growing further in 2003 (the deficit for this year exceeds $US 100 billion).  The US trade deficit with China is occurring at a time when the US also has both a large overall current account deficit and a growing budget deficit (the budget position under the Bush administration has changed from a surplus of 1.4 percent of GDP to a deficit of 4.8 percent).  China’s competitiveness in the US market has been assisted by the Chinese policy of fixing the value of the Yuan against the US dollar.  This has been criticised heavily by US manufacturers, who argue that the Chinese currency is artificially undervalued.  There has also been criticism over the slow pace of Chinese trade liberalisation since it joined the WTO in 2001.

H-net.orghttp://www.h-net.org [H-net.org] H-Net Review: Timothy J. McKeown on Beyond Bilateralism: U.S. ...: While Japan and the US have always had their differences about how to approach conflicts within the region, the highly public, highly assertive and military security-dominated approach of the Bush administration is generally seen by the contributors as standing in sharper contrast to Japanese policies than has U.S. policy of recent administrations. Partly for this reason, the traditional bilateral security relationship is slowly being supplemented by multilateral discussions.

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