Posts Tagged ‘South perspectives’
Short Essays on Trade
You may all have seen this, but here is a compilation of short essays mostly revolving around trade and global trade governance.
I haven’t read them all, and some of the ones I’ve read haven’t resonated that much with me, but there are some useful insights sprinkled in there. One of my favourite essays is this one, which builds into the meta-question we talked about yesterday – the one that challenges the primacy of trade, our “trade-above-all” position.
The point that Tandon makes about the salience of power and how the West has been able to define the terms with which we view trade is interesting in the possibilities it throws up. Perhaps one of the issues we ought to look at is the definition of tradable commodities and this idea of the value chain. Who decides what gets commoditised and what is a “higher value-add” product or service? This has historically been defined by the West and the theory of comparative advantage. Is this landscape going to shift in the future? Certainly the fallout from any food crisis would be instructive here.
Thoughts welcomed.
