Trade and Payments

The State of The Economy Prabhat Patnaik

Newspaper headlines over the last few days have highlighted three facts which point to the current abysmal state of the Indian economy. The first relates to inflation, where the June 2018 wholesale price index was 5.77 percent above that of June last year; this is the highest inflation rate witnessed since December 2013. The second is a burgeoning trade deficit: the trade deficit in June, at $ 16.6 billion, was again the highest for any month in the last five years. The third relates to the industrial stagnation that has set in: the growth in factory output in May (the…

A Legacy of Vulnerability C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh

Recent months have been marked by an exit of foreign investors from India’s financial markets, triggered by the end of quantitative easing in the US and Europe and hikes in policy interest rates in the former. This has resulted over the last few weeks in a sharp depreciation of the rupee relative to the dollar, which not only raises the rupee costs of imports, but also the rupee equivalent of payments made to service foreign debt. That has meant that India is now paying the price for a legacy of debt built up during the years when the Federal Reserve…

Has Donald Trump Already Changed US Trade? C.P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh

There is no doubt that President Trump is upending global trade. He has unleashed a trade war with China as well as with some of the US’ s purported allies, using grounds of “threats to national security” to impose tariffs on many US imports. The likely retaliation will obviously affect some US exports in turn. The trajectory of world trade suddenly looks quite uncertain – and this will also depress investment across the trading world. So the Trump effect on world trade is clearly just beginning. But the naked self-interest of Trump’s moves, the “America first” orientation declared by the…

The return of the Oil Threat C. P. Chandrasekhar

On the morning of April 24, the price of Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil prices, rose above $75 a barrel, touching its highest level since 2014 and signalling the return of an era of high oil prices. That is a $30 per barrel or 66 per cent rise from the previous low of around 10 months ago. As expected, this has made oil importers nervous. But, despite the benefits it would bring US shale producers, even President Donald Trump is rattled. In one more of his infamous early morning tweets he declared: “Looks like OPEC is at it…

The collapse in developing country exports C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh

If there has been one big change in the nature of the global economy in the second decade of this century, it is in global trade. In the first decade of this century, especially in the period 2002-08, cross-border trade grew much more rapidly than total world output, and the integration of countries through greater exchange of goods and services essentially became the primary engine of growth. It is true that the explosion of financial activity that has become such a prominent feature of contemporary capitalism also added substantially to income growth – and indeed generated the bubbles that were…

Trump’s Trade War C. P. Chandrasekhar

After a year of huffing and puffing, President Donald Trump has launched, since January this year, what some are terming a trade war—fought in scattered industrial and selected locations. It started with quotas and tariffs on solar panel and washing machine imports, but then moved menacingly to steel and aluminium. Tariffs on these two products have been imposed under a WTO clause relating to imports that threaten national security, even while Trump’s rhetoric refers to competition from "cheap metal that is subsidized by foreign countries", which amounts to a completely different ‘dumping’ charge. With the tariff hike on steel at…

The imperial intentions of Trump’s trade war babble Andrew M. Fischer

Trump’s trade tirades are being vigorously disputed by liberal economists the world over, although the riposte is usually in defence of free trade and existing trade deals. However, many of these same economists have promulgated the underlying idea that US trade deficits are the result of some sort of disadvantage or decline. For instance, as I discussed in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012, many prominent economists such as Paul Krugman argued then (and many still do now) that China’s undervalued currency gave it an unfair advantage, causing deficits and even financial bubbles in the US. Many economists on the left…

Multilateralism redux and the Havana Charter Richard Kozul-Wright

President Donald Trump’s tariff tantrum has provoked a mixture of disbelief and loathing, none more than from economic pundits who have deemed it irrelevant (for reducing the trade deficit), irresponsible (in damaging job prospects) and irrational (by weakening the global value chains on which American business depends). Much of this criticism hits the mark. But it is worked in to a meta-narrative about the end of the post-war liberal order that not only presents a flawed interpretation of history but one that is unlikely to help advance a policy agenda that speaks to the anxiety and anger that President Trump…

Trump’s Protectionism Prabhat Patnaik

On March 8 Donald Trump made an announcement which according to many has the potential of starting a global trade war. He announced that the U.S. would be raising tariffs on imported steel by 25 percent and tariffs on imported aluminium by 10 percent. Now, the WTO allows tariffs under certain circumstances, against for instance some country that is “unfairly” subsidizing its exports, or is dumping its goods, which means charging higher prices on the domestic market for the same goods that are sold cheap in the export market. It also allows tariffs under a “safeguard” clause whereby a country…