A World Trading System for the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

Comments welcome. This is an excerpt from a first draft of a book of the same title to be published by MIT Press in its Ohlin Lecture series. The complete first draft can be viewed at https://sites.dartmouth.edu/rstaiger/files/2021/06/Ohlin_Book_RWS_06012021_CompleteFirstDraft.pdf. I thank

Trump Ended WTO Dispute Settlement. Trade Remedies are Needed to Fix it

“…Sykes (2005) has broadly suggested such an approach for subsidies disciplines. Staiger (forthcoming) has applied it more broadly to the challenges posed by China's economic system 28…”

“…Trade remedies would then be part of the toolkit to use when non–market economies take actions that create major deviations from those market access promises. Staiger (forthcoming) makes the additional argument that China could find such an approach attractive if it also meant that trading partners stopped meddling in its internal (domestic) policies, its SOEs, its industrial policy plans, etc.…”

A World Trading System for the Twenty-First Century

“…And the rules can be very important to the outcome. This paper, composed of a selection of chapters drawn from a longer monograph (Staiger, 2021), is about the rules that guided the global economy of the twentieth century, how those rules came about, the logic of their design, their successes and failures, and whether they are adequate for the twenty-…rst century.…”

“…In this introductory chapter I sketch in broad and intuitive terms the main themes that I develop in greater detail in later chapters here and more fully in Staiger (2021). While those chapters provide the technical detail necessary for the formal arguments that underpin many of the statements that I make here, my intent in this chapter is to provide an overview of these themes at a level that would be accessible to anyone with an undergraduate Econ 1 background.…”

“…1 As such, there are no equations in this chapter, and there is nothing beyond the bare minimum in terms of formal notation. Nor have I included in this chapter the quali…cations that a careful treatment would demand or citations to the relevant literature (beyond citations for a reproduced …gure or quotation): those also appear in later chapters here and in Staiger (2021). Instead, in this chapter there are only words, graphs and a few plots of data to convey the main ideas.…”