All Posts Tagged With: "international trade"

The Right Amount of Manufacturing

Mark Perry, an economics professor at the University of Michigan, recently pointed out that in 2009 the U.S. economy had the world’s largest manufacturing sector. (The most recent data show that China’s sector edged out the United States because of our slow economic recovery.) Every year since 2004 U.S. manufacturing output, in constant 2005 dollars, [...]

22Jun2011 | David R. Henderson | 7 comments | Continued

Don’t Worry About the Yuan

Especially during dismal economic times, many Americans—goaded by media figures and politicians—look with suspicion on foreigners. This tendency is most obvious in anti-immigrant sentiment, but also manifests itself in a drive for protective tariffs and other trade restrictions. Over the past few years China’s “currency manipulation” has been a particularly hot-button issue. Pundits claim the [...]

25May2011 | Robert P. Murphy | 4 comments | Continued

The Law Merchant and International Trade

Is the State necessary for flourishing international trade? Conventional wisdom thinks so. According to that wisdom, private international commerce would wither without intergovernmental treaties, State courts dealing with international affairs, and State-crafted legal practices for international merchants. Some commentators have gone so far as to suggest that a world legal system is needed to ensure [...]

21Apr2011 | and and Peter T. Leeson | 3 comments | Continued

Tariffs are Legal Plunder

Everybody has an issue he reacts to most intensely. [Frederic] Bastiat’s was tariffs. And his most barbed comments were directed against those who favored governmental protection of national industry from foreign competition. He thought this legal method of cheating consumers by keeping prices above the market was a perfect example of how governments plunder their [...]

7Jul2010 | Dean Russell | 1 comment | Continued

Let’s Not Be Energy Independent

“Energy independence” is a term that sounds good but falls apart on closer examination. Although the United States could achieve energy independence, we could do so only at an enormous cost. Energy “dependence” is much cheaper and much more desirable. Before considering the costs and benefits of energy independence, I should define my terms. What [...]

1Oct2008 | David R. Henderson | 10 comments | Continued

Commerce, Markets, and Peace: Richard Cobden’s Enduring Lessons

Edward Stringham is a visiting associate professor of economics at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. A longer version of this article won second prize (faculty division) in the 2003 Olive W. Garvey Fellowship Program for the Independent Institute and is reprinted in Opposing the Crusader State: Alternatives to Global Interventionism, edited by Robert Higgs and [...]

1Oct2008 | Edward P. Stringham | 0 comments | Continued

Aid, Trade, and Institutional Quality in Africa

Joshua Hall is pursuing his Ph.D. in economics at West Virginia University. Matthew Hisrich is a senior policy fellow with the Flint Hills Center for Public Policy in Kansas. Screenwriter Richard Curtis received a great deal of attention for his 2005 movie The Girl in the Café. The film was the big-screen component of the [...]

1Jan2007 | and and Joshua C. Hall | 0 comments | Continued

The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade

With the increasing trade of goods and services across national borders and the erosion of command economies, the enemies of the market have now become “anti-globalists.” To them, “globalization”—specifically, international trade and investment—is responsible for poverty and deteriorating living conditions, especially in underdeveloped countries. Prompted by a protester’s assertion about the squalid conditions in which [...]

1Apr2006 | Tom Welch | 0 comments | Continued

Presumptuous Protectionism

If someone gets caught selling somebody elses property,
he goes to jail.What may be legally bought and
sold in the market is limited to legitimate private
property acquired by ones own effort or through voluntary
exchange with others. Since legal transactions are
settled accounts, what is traded belongs to neither the
government nor the community. It is private property,
and as such the owner can dispose of it at his sole discretion,
limited only by other peoples
rights. Correct?

1Dec2005 | Manuel F. Ayau | 2 comments | Continued

Economic Freedom: The Path to Development

Economic development has historically been exceptional rather than typical. As Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has observed in The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, capitalism has been successful mainly in the West. Consequently, there are tremendous income disparities around the world. In 2000, real income per person [...]

1Apr2005 | Gerald P. O'Driscoll, Jr. | 0 comments | Continued

Buying Foreign Goods Saves American Jobs

Roger Simmermaker of Orlando, Florida, is leading a national campaign to encourage Americans to “Buy American.” In 1996 Simmermaker wrote How Americans Can Buy American, which recently was published in a second edition.1 The book, as its title implies, provides guidance on how to identify and buy American products in today’s integrated global marketplace. Simmermaker [...]

1Jun2004 | Robert Carreira | 35 comments | Continued

A Deficit of Understanding II

Writing in the January/February 2004 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Sherle Schwenninger of the New America Foundation joined Warren Buffett and scores of politicians in bewailing America’s trade deficit. Like his intellectual compatriots, Schwenninger simply assumes that the trade deficit is debt and that it’s ominous. It is neither. A trade deficit exists for the [...]

1Jun2004 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 3 comments | Continued

The Season of Protectionism

N. Gregory Mankiw, the Harvard professor who now chairs the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, had a rough lesson in Washington culture a few months ago. Talking to reporters, he set off a firestorm when he said, “Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade. More things are tradable than were tradable in [...]

1May2004 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Free-Trade Theory No Longer Applies?

In an op-ed in the January 6 New York Times, “liberal” U.S. Senator Charles Schumer and conservative economist Paul Craig Roberts tapped into the anxiety felt by many Americans about their changing roles in the global economy. The authors argued that new economic conditions undermine the classic argument for free trade: The case for free [...]

1May2004 | Gene Callahan | 0 comments | Continued

Globalization and Free Trade

Freedom of trade is really a very simple concept. Each individual should be at liberty to buy from and sell to whomever he wishes on mutually agreed-upon terms. Whether the partners to this trade live next door to each other or are separated by thousands of miles should make absolutely no difference to the logic [...]

1Apr2004 | Richard M. Ebeling | 6 comments | Continued

There’s Still Work to Do

Free trade is again under assault. If there is one reason for the perennial attack it is likely the one Frédéric Bastiat made so much of: the failure to look for what is “unseen.” The costs of free trade (temporary job loss, closed firms) are easily traced to the free movement of goods, services, and [...]

1Apr2004 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

A Deficit of Understanding

“Nothing, however, can be more absurd than this whole doctrine of the balance of trade.” —Adam Smith The Wealth of Nations Here’s some sound advice: don’t worry about the trade deficit. The pundits’ and politicians’ hysteria over the trade deficit is rooted in confusion. The fact is, a trade deficit is unlikely to be a [...]

1Apr2004 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 5 comments | Continued
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