Future of Trade

Hi all, would like to share this article with you.

For me, my thoughts on the future of trade, is that world trade will not settle on “protectionism” as a steady state. World’s trade may move towards protectionism, since major powers, like the U.S., have already been using import taxes to raise revenues, but economic history (and theory) has shown that trade barriers using taxes/subsidies, or better known as “beggar thy neighbour”, will ultimately result in retaliations from trading partners, to the point that international trade will shrink to near zero, and such is not a “win win” scenario to any trading country. Besides, we have international bodies like the WTO to ensure that protectionism is not advocated. So as an economic incentive, countries that might move towards protectionism, will only enjoy revenue gains in the short run, but suffer immensely when world trade collapses in the long run.

But that’s only what theory says, and history may not be an accurate representation as to what will happen in the future. Environmental Security is one issue we must take into account when crafting future hypotheses/scenarios. Will free trade help or hurt the climate? There has and always been an emphasis on green technology for e.g. fission energy, solar energy etc. Green houses are already being built to save the environment. The thing is, that the people are serious about it and the direction trade is going to take might be dictated by its involvement in saving/hurting the planet.

The article is at: http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/does-free-trade-help-or-hurt-the-climate/
Regards,
Barnabas

NTU runs a Centre for Trade and Negotiations, with some articles available at

http://www.tfctn.org.sg/newsroom.htm

While many articles provide familiar background expositions, the most interesting is probably “Tackling the challenges to Trade” by Barry Desker / Deborah Kay Elms, which seeks to link Climate Change with Trade. They write: shifts in patterns of trade could come from (1) climate change impacts farmers in developing world disproportionately (2) firms relocate to states with lax environmental policies (3) environmental negotiations tied with trade negotiations, thereby altering cost/benefit calculus in trade policy.

The Arctic is melting much faster than anticipated, so what’s the impact of sustained shipping from Northern Europe/USA to North Asia via the Arctic instead of Singapore? Peter Schwartz doesn’t think it would impact Singapore that much because it’s only seasonal shipping when we last asked him, but what do you think? The actual slideshare is here.

Hi everyone, it was nice meeting up today and let’s just kickstart it with posting and sharing articles, videos etc related to future of trade. I love Zhi Jia saying “It must make us uncomfortable!” and that’s the spirit of enquiry that’s very beneficial in pushing the boundaries beyond the known unknowns to the unknown unknowns for this topic. Gambatte!

There is a tag cloud that appears on the right. I’m tentatively just adding some starting tags, you can choose to use them to tag your post or just add your own if you find tags that are missing, or better. You can add as many tags for each post as you like.

When you are posting and you want to add a link to another article, just highlight and click on the ‘link’ icon. If you like to upload pictures/videos etc, just click on the icons next to the upload/insert above the ruler. These last two will make more sense when you start posting.

Happy posting!