trade

China 11.9% GDP growth

The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on Thursday released an upward revision of 2007 gross domestic product (GDP) that showed growth of 11.9 percent, or 0.5 point more than the initial estimate.
A statement from the agency said that last year's GDP was 291.1 billion yuan (about $41.63 billion) larger than originally estimated, which meant that GDP was 24.953 trillion yuan last year

Conservatism Doesn't Equal Free Trade

An Interesting New York Times, Op-Ed shows that Reagan was not completely free trade nor is this a conservative value.

I have to agree with Robert E. Lighthizer via this op-ed, and we see so many Paleo-conservatives who are looking at the results of these trade agreements along with Progressives and Populists and shouting from the rooftops for reforms pretty much along with us.

President Reagan’s pragmatism contrasted strongly with the utopian dreams of free traders. Ever since Edmund Burke criticized the French philosophes, Anglo-American conservatism has rejected ivory-tower theories that disregard the realities of everyday life.

The Nation, Greider on Gomory, Dem Policy

This is a very critical article, written in April, 2007 The Establishment Rethinks Globalization. by William Greider. It covers Gomory and the attempts to interject sanity into US trade policy.

Gomory's critique has great political potential because it provides what the opponents of corporate-led globalization have generally lacked: a comprehensive intellectual platform for arguing that the US approach to globalization must be transformed to defend the national interest. Still, it will take politicians of courage to embrace his ideas and act on them. Gomory's political solutions are as heretical as his economic analysis

Economists Rethink Free Trade

Business week has a new article, Economists Rethink Free Trade

I find this amusing for for what I have read, the good economists for a long time have said current trade policy is not in the national interests and often is glorified labor arbitrage agreements.

From Alan S. Blinder, a former vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve and member of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Clinton Administration, to Dartmouth's Matthew J. Slaughter, an international economist who served on President George W. Bush's CEA, many in the profession are reevaluating the impact of globalization. They have studied the growth of low-wage work abroad and seen how high-speed telecommunications make it possible to handle more jobs offshore. Now they fear these factors are more menacing than they first thought

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