Is the U.S. Trade Representative a Closet Free Trader?
Not to get him in trouble with his boss, but U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk has been sounding like a free trader lately. I’m beginning to think Ambassador Kirk consumes the analyses we produce over here at the Cato Institute’s Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies. Well, let me rephrase: that he consumes the meat of our analyses, but still hides the vegetables under the picked-over potatoes.
Still, that’s pretty commendable for a Washington policymaker.
Just the other day, Ambassador Kirk lamented how policymakers do a poor job selling trade agreements to a skeptical public. Inside U.S. Trade [$] paraphrased Kirk as saying:
[P]oliticians must ‘talk about trade differently’ and demonstrate how trade policy is directly responsible for sustaining economic growth and creating jobs. If the focus is only on how trade deals will improve supply chains for businesses, for instance, that is not enough to build the base for support for trade deals.
That is a sound criticism. The typical, mercantilist arguments that tout the benefits of exports and rationalize imports as necessary evils are foolish and self-defeating—particularly in a country that will run trade deficits into the distant future as its economy continues to grow and attract greater amounts of foreign investment. The freedom to engage in commerce with whom and how one chooses, and the impact of import competition are the real benefits of freer trade.
Like some others in town, we at Cato advocate free trade. But unlike most, we advocate free trade here in the United States—not just over there in foreign countries. Free trade requires more than getting other governments to eliminate their barriers to U.S. exports; it requires getting the U.S. government to eliminate its barriers to U.S. imports from abroad. The latter is the real objective of free trade advocacy and the well-spring of most of its benefits.
But the economic benefits of imports rarely make the Washington “free trade advocate’s” Top-10 list of talking points, nor do they officially register in the minds of trade negotiators, whose chief aims are to secure for their exporters the greatest possible access to foreign markets, while simultaneously conceding to foreigners as little access as possible to the domestic market. “Import” is a four-letter word in the Washington trade policy community.
That’s why Ambassador Kirk’s recent comments have me thinking: epiphany?
In a statement responding to the WTO Appellate Body ruling last week that China’s export restrictions on nine raw materials were not in conformity with that country’s WTO commitments, Ambassador Kirk made the point that U.S. firms that use those raw materials will be better able to compete once those restrictions are lifted.
Today’s decision ensures that core manufacturing industries in this country can get the materials they need to produce and compete on a level playing field.
The USTR had previously made the following point:
These raw material inputs are used to make many processed products in a number of primary manufacturing industries, including steel, aluminum and various chemical industries. These products, in turn become essential components in even more numerous downstream products.
Technically, Ambassador Kirk is not engaging in profanity—he doesn’t use the word import. But his argument against Chinese export restrictions is just as applicable to U.S. import restrictions. Removing restrictions—whether the export variety imposed by foreign governments or the import variety imposed by our own—reduces input prices, lowers domestic production costs, enables more competitive final-goods pricing and, thus, greater profits for U.S.-based producers.
So let’s take Ambassador Kirk’s sound logic and see if it might apply elsewhere in the realm of U.S. trade policy. If the U.S. government thought it worthwhile to take China to the WTO over the restrictions it imposes on raw material exports because those restrictions hurt U.S. producers, then why does the same U.S. government impose its own restrictions on imports of some of the very same raw materials? That’s right. The United States maintains antidumping duties on magnesium, silicon metal, and coke (all raw materials subject to Chinese export restrictions).
If Ambassador Kirk ate the vegetables as well as the meat of Cato’s trade policy analyses, he would recognize that his logic provides a compelling case for antidumping reforms, such as one requiring the administering authorities to consider the economic impact of antidumping measures on producers in downstream industries, such as magnesium-cast automobile parts producers, manufacturers of silicones used in solar panels, and even steel producers, who require coke for their blast furnaces.
We will know that the ambassador has eaten his free-trade vegetables when he starts sounding like former USTR Robert Zoellick who once hoped for the Doha Round of trade negotiations that it would “[T]urn every corner store in America into a duty-free shop.”
Dirty Deal Done Not So Dirt Cheap
Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI)*, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and the White House have just announced that they have made a deal to extend Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA, the program that extends extra unemployment and health care benefits to workers who lose their jobs because of globalization) until 2013, as part of a broader deal that would see passage of the three outstanding preferential trade agreements with Korea, Colombia, and Panama. The extension of TAA would be included in the legislation to implement the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement, “improved” (i.e., made less liberalizing) by the administration in December.
Interestingly and alarmingly, because implementing the FTAs (which will lower tariff revenue) and paying for the billion-dollar-plus TAA extension “requires” offsets, the draft language specifies in Sec. 601 that revenue should be raised by increasing customs user fees. This solution was first aired publicly last week, and my friend, trade lawyer (and former Cato-ite) Scott Lincicome pointed out then that raising customs user fees is probably against WTO rules (not to mention counterproductive to the goal of liberalizing trade):
“[C]ustoms fees” are simply hidden taxes on import consumers. A quick review of the US Customs website on “customs users fees” makes this clear. They’re paid (mainly) by commercial transporters bringing goods (imports) into the United States, thus raising the costs of importation. And those higher costs, of course, are eventually passed on to American consumers through higher import prices.
Thus, pursuant to the bi-partisan deal outlined above, the FTAs’ great import liberalization benefits will be immediately and tangibly undermined by new taxes on those very same imports (and others)!
…[I]t would [also] probably violate GATT Article VIII, which governs WTO Members’ imposition of “Fees and Formalities connected with Importation and Exportation” (in other words, customs fees). The key provision of Article VIII reads:
1.(a) All fees and charges of whatever character (other than import and export duties and other than taxes within the purview of Article III) imposed by contracting parties on or in connection with importation or exportation shall be limited in amount to the approximate cost of services rendered and shall not represent an indirect protection to domestic products or a taxation of imports or exports for fiscal purposes.
WTO panels have interpreted this provision narrowly, and an old GATT panel has actually looked into the US system of customs users fees. In these cases, the panels have ruled that Article VIII’s requirement that a customs fee be “limited in amount to the approximate cost of services rendered” is actually a “dual requirement,” because the charge in question must first involve a “service” rendered, and then the level of the charge must not exceed the approximate cost of that “service.” They’ve also found that the term “services rendered” means “services rendered to the individual importer in question,” and that the fees cannot be imposed to raise revenue (i.e., for “fiscal purposes”).[emphasis in original]
Antidumping Reform Crucial to U.S. Competitiveness
The Cato Institute today published its 13th policy paper on the topic of antidumping. “Economic Self-Flagellation: How U.S. Antidumping Policy Subverts the National Export Initiative” describes with compelling anecdotes and data how the outdated assumptions of a 90-year-old law—one purported to “level the playing field” and protect U.S. companies from “unfair” foreign competition—conspire with its overzealous application to erode the competitiveness of U.S. firms.
During the decade from January 2000 through December 2009, the U.S. government imposed 164 antidumping measures on a variety of products from dozens of countries. A total of 130 of those 164 measures restricted (and in most cases, still restrict) imports of intermediate goods and raw materials used by downstream U.S. producers in the production of their final products. Those restrictions raise the costs of production for the downstream firms, weakening their capacity to compete with foreign producers in the United States and abroad.
In all of those cases, trade-restricting antidumping measures were imposed without any of the downstream companies first having been afforded opportunities to demonstrate the likely adverse impact on their own business operations. This is by design. The antidumping statute forbids the administering authorities from considering the impact of prospective duties on consuming industries—or on the economy more broadly—when weighing whether or not to impose duties.
That asymmetry has always been insane, but given the emergence and proliferation of transnational production and supply chains and cross-border investment (i.e., globalization)—evidenced by the fact that 55% of all U.S. import value consists of raw materials, intermediate goods, and capital equipment (the purchases of U.S. producers)—it is now nothing short of self-flagellation.
Most of those import-consuming, downstream producers—those domestic victims of the U.S. antidumping law—are also struggling U.S. exporters. In fact those downstream companies are much more likely to export and create new jobs than are the firms that turn to the antidumping law to restrict trade. Antidumping duties on magnesium, polyvinyl chloride, and hot-rolled steel, for example, may please upstream, petitioning domestic producers, who can subsequently raise their prices and reap greater profits. But those same “protective” duties are extremely costly to U.S. producers of auto parts, paint, and appliances, who require those inputs for their own manufacturing processes.
President Obama acknowledges as much. On August 11, 2010, at a White House signing ceremony, the president offered the following rationale for a bill that he was about to sign into law:
The Manufacturing Enhancement Act of 2010 will create jobs, help American companies compete, and strengthen manufacturing as a key driver of our economic recovery. And here’s how it works. To make their products, manufacturers—some of whom are represented here today—often have to import certain materials from other countries and pay tariffs on those materials. This legislation will reduce or eliminate some of those tariffs, which will significantly lower costs for American companies across the manufacturing landscape—from cars to chemicals; medical devices to sporting goods. And that will boost output, support good jobs here at home, and lower prices for American consumers.
Higher input prices stemming from antidumping measures are only the first assault on these downstream firms. The next wave usually takes the form of stiffer competition from firms in countries where there are no antidumping duties on the critical input. As a result, the foreign competition often operates at a cost advantage in the United States and in other markets that enables it to sell profitably at lower prices than U.S. firms can charge.
If Only the USTR Were This Enthusiastic about Liberalizing Trade
There was really never any doubt that the United States would prevail in the dispute brought by China to the World Trade Organization over President Obama’s decision last year to levy duties on tire imports from China. The WTO verdict, revealed yesterday, simply affirms that the administration acted in accordance with U.S. WTO commitments—and leaves to others, such as myself, to conclude that the duties were a highly political act perpetrated with utter contempt for the significant economic and diplomatic costs of those actions.
Thus, “prevailing” in the WTO case should not be considered a source of universal joy for all Americans or even most Americans, as one might infer from the reaction of U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk, who jubilantly proclaimed, “This is a major victory for the United States and particularly for American workers and businesses.” Really, Ambassador Kirk? Tell that to the American workers and businesses involved in importing, trucking, wholesaling, retailing, and installing those Chinese-made tires. Tell it to the American workers and businesses who also happen to be U.S. tire consumers and are now lighter in their wallets or dangerously riding on worn treads as a result of the duties. Feel free to ask the workers and businesses in the U.S. poultry and auto parts industries—against whom the Chinese imposed antidumping duties immediately after the tire tariffs took effect—how they feel about having “prevailed.”
In fairness to Ambassador Kirk, in addition to working to open markets abroad, the USTR’s office is tasked with prosecuting challenges of our trade partners’ allegedly non-compliant policies and actions, as well as defending challenges to allegedly non-compliant U.S. policies and actions at the WTO. In that regard, warding off a challenge from China of the U.S. Section 421 law constitutes, arguably, a victory for the USTR’s office. But to be clear, Section 421 is a blatantly protectionist law that serves, at best, a sliver of the U.S. population slightly broader than the U.S. Congress.
As part of its WTO accession agreement in 2001, China agreed to allow the United States and other WTO members to treat it differently—indeed, discriminatorily—on several matters for a number of years after it joined the WTO. The China-Specific Safeguard mechanism (known legally as Section 421 of the Trade Act of 1974 and under which the tire tariffs were implemented in September 2009) authorizes the United States to impose duties if there is a surge in imports from China that is causing or threatening market disruption in the United States. Market disruption exists “whenever imports of an article like of directly competitive with an article produced by a domestic industry are increasing rapidly, either absolutely or relatively, so as to be a significant cause of material injury, or threat of material injury, to the domestic industry.” In other words, if U.S. industry is suffering the effects of normal competition—that is, if it must compete against more capable or more efficient foreign competitors—then the firms or workers in the U.S. industry can petition the U.S. government to raise those competitors’ prices through the imposition of trade restraints.
It is also important to appreciate what Section 421 is not. Contrary to the rhetoric of too many politicians, trade lawyers, and union bosses, 421 is not an “unfair trade” statute. Unlike the antidumping and countervailing duty laws, a Section 421 case does not include allegations of prices at less than fair value or prices that benefit from countervailable government subsidies. The evidentiary threshold is much lower. All that is alleged-and all that has to be established-in a 421 petition is that imports from China are increasing in such a manner as to be a cause of market disruption (or threat thereof) to the domestic industry.
Section 421 is not intended to remedy any wrongdoing on the part of Chinese exporters, but is intended rather to give U.S. producers the opportunity to holler “time out!” as they catch their breath, assess prospects, and attempt to adjust to a new level of competition. Of course there are huge costs to this kind of intervention in the marketplace, thus the president is granted discretion, under the law, to deny relief if he determines that the costs to the broader economy clearly exceed any benefits to the petitioning industry. While such discretion provides some comfort that the law’s relaxed evidentiary standards won’t be routinely abused by domestic interests seeking to stifle competition, there are no guarantees that the president’s discretion will be based exclusively on considerations of the national economic interest. If there were, it would be nearly impossible to conjure a scenario in which the concentrated, temporary benefits to a specific industry receiving protection were not overwhelmed by the costs of that protection on the broader economy. Political considerations always influence decisions that lead to protection.
Yesterday’s WTO decision was arguably a victory for the rule of law in international trade—but also a reminder that politicians write the rules of trade, including some that are so antithetical to its purpose. I would be willing to cut Ambassador Kirk more slack for his jubilation if he were to find religion on the WTO and abide the rulings–such as on zeroing, gambling, and cotton subsidies–that his (and his predecessors’) office has lost.
Democrats Ignore 80% of Workers in Service Sector
In a bid to revive their sagging election prospects, congressional Democrats have hit on the theme of promoting domestic U.S. manufacturing. As a front-page story in the Washington Post reports today, the party has adopted the bumper-sticker slogan, “Make It in America.”
I’m all for making things in America, when it makes economic sense to do so. But the Democratic plan opens a window for all sorts of government intervention, including trade barriers, higher taxes on U.S.-owned affiliates abroad, and subsidies for “clean energy” and make-work infrastructure projects.
The campaign relies on two major but faulty assumptions: That U.S. manufacturing is in deep trouble, and that creating more manufacturing jobs is the key to prosperity. Neither assumption is true.
As I explained in a Washington Times column yesterday:
Despite worries about “de-industrialization,” America remains a global manufacturing power. Our nation leads the world in manufacturing “value-added,” the value of what we produce domestically after subtracting imported components. The volume of domestic manufacturing output, according to the Federal Reserve Board, has rebounded by 8 percent from the recession lows of a year ago. Even after the Great Recession, U.S. manufacturing output remains 50 percent higher than what it was two decades ago in the era before NAFTA and the WTO.
Manufacturing jobs have been in decline for 30 years, not because of declining production, but because remaining workers are so much more productive.
Again, I’m all for manufacturing jobs supported by a free market, but members of Congress need to wake up to the reality that America today is a middle-class service economy. As I wrote in the column yesterday:
More than 80 percent of Americans earn their living in the service sector, including a broad swath of the middle class gainfully employed in education, health care, finance, and business and professional occupations.
It is one of the big lies of the trade debate that manufacturing jobs are being replaced by low-paying service jobs. Since the early 1990s, two-thirds of the net new jobs created have been in service sectors where the average pay is higher than in manufacturing. Members of Congress who belittle the service sector are ignoring the interests of a large majority of their constituents.
Congress and the president should focus on economic policies that promote overall economic growth, not policies that favor one sector of the economy over all the others.
Time to Lose the Trade Enforcement Fig Leaf
During his SOTU address last week, the president declared it a national goal to double our exports over the next five years. As my colleague Dan Griswold argues (a point that is echoed by others in this NYT article), such growth is probably unrealistic. But with incomes rising in China, India and throughout the developing world, and with huge amounts of savings accumulated in Asia, strong U.S. export growth in the years ahead should be a given—unless we screw it up with a provocative enforcement regime.
The president said:
If America sits on the sidelines while other nations sign trade deals, we will lose the chance to create jobs on our shores. But realizing those benefits also means enforcing those agreements so our trading partners play by the rules.
Ah, the enforcement canard!
One of the more persistent myths about trade is that we don’t adequately enforce our trade agreements, which has given our trade partners license to cheat. And that chronic cheating—dumping, subsidization, currency manipulation, opaque market barriers, and other underhanded practices—the argument goes, explains our trade deficit and anemic job growth.
But lack of enforcement is a myth that was concocted by congressional Democrats (Sander Levin chief among them) as a fig leaf behind which they could abide Big Labor’s wish to terminate the trade agenda. As the Democrats prepared to assume control of Congress in January 2007, better enforcement—along with demands for actionable labor and environmental standards—was used to cast their opposition to trade as conditional, even vaguely appealing to moderate sensibilities. But as is evident in Congress’s enduring refusal to consider the three completed bilateral agreements with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea (which all exceed Democratic demands with respect to labor and the environment), Democratic opposition to trade is not conditional, but systemic.
Australian Trade Scholars Offer Perfect Cure for ‘Protectionitis’
Earlier this month, the Lowy Institute in Australia published a paper offering some very sound and, obviously, very timely advice about how to contain, and ultimately, eradicate protectionism. The paper is being circulated among the G20 delegations, who will undoubtedly discuss the topic of trade and protectionism in Pittsburgh next week. So for those of you interested in getting a sense of what will probably be the single best idea on (or at least near) the table at the G20 summit, I highly recommend this 20-pager.
The solution proposed by the authors boils down to a two-word phrase: “Domestic Transparency.” What is meant by that phrase is that “defeating protectionism begins at home.” And by that slogan, the authors mean that the key to reducing, and ultimately eliminating, protectionism is not external pressure from other countries, mercantilist trade negotiations, or filing trade complaints at the WTO, but rather greater awareness at home of the real costs of protectionism. I couldn’t agree more. (In fact better transparency is one of our recommendations in this paper).
When governments impose trade barriers at the behest of special interests, they usually justify that protectionism with diversionary rhetoric concerning some vague conception of the “national interest,” and the imperative of shielding domestic business from unfair competition and other vagaries of the globalized economy. That the protectionist measure itself—the product of special interests diverting productive resources from economic to political ends—forces involuntary and usually unknowing subsidization of those protection-seekers by the same citizens at large who are expected to buy into the national interest canard is a detail about which most people remain in the dark.
Tuesday Afternoon Hypocrisy
An article today in Congress Daily [$] made me laugh out loud. In a “Geez, these people have some nerve” kind of way.
A bunch of politicians have written to Obama, saying that Airbus should be disqualified from the current bidding process for the Air Force refueling tanker contract on the grounds that the World Trade Organization has reportedly (the final ruling is not yet out) ruled EU subsidies to Airbus illegal. Here’s part of their letter:
Buying Airbus tankers would reward European governments with Department of Defense dollars at the same time that the U.S. Trade Representative is trying to punish European governments for flouting international laws… American taxpayers must not be forced to foot the bill for products which benefited from illegal subsidies.
As I wrote to my colleagues when the news came over email, I wonder if those same politicians (authors, by the way, of the auto bailout and cash-for-clunkers) will be as indignant about subsidized companies if/when Boeing’s subsidies, currently being examined in a counter-challenge at the WTO, are ruled illegal. And how about all those illegal cotton subsidies that the United States doles out? Should taxpayers be footing the bill for storing cotton (scroll down, under “Commodity Certificates”)?
In any case, while I feel sorry for the taxpayers who pay for them, foreign subsidies are a gift to the U.S. consumer. The bill that American taxpayers are being “forced to foot” is smaller than it otherwise would be because of the corporate welfare flowing to Airbus. (Note to the libertarian purity police: I’m not advocating for corporate welfare here, just noting the other side of the economic ledger).
French Folly
Following the dubious example set recently by U.S. legislators, French politicians have informally proposed slapping punitive tariffs on goods from countries who refuse to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The German State Secretary for the Environment has, quite rightly, called foul:
There are two problems — the WTO (World Trade Organization), and the signal would be that this is a new form of eco-imperialism,” Machnig said.
”We are closing our markets for their products, and I don’t think this is a very helpful signal for the international negotiations.”
I have a paper forthcoming on the carbon tariff issue, but in the meantime here’s a recent op-ed (written jointly with Pat Michaels) on climate change policy mis-steps.
About That Vision Thing…
Does the world need a “shared vision on food and agricultural trade policy”? So says World Trade Organization Director General Pascal Lamy:
Let me start by saying that food and agricultural trade policy does not operate in a vacuum. In other words, no matter how sophisticated our trade policies may be, if domestic policies do not themselves incentivize agriculture, and internalize negative social and environmental externalities, then we will always have a problem.
Here I question what exactly Lamy means by “incentivize”. Does he mean “make sure we get incentives right”, or does he mean “provide positive incentives to agriculture”? The former probably is harmless if it means simply allowing market forces to work, the latter a potential opening for the types of subsidies and price supports that have done so much damage to agricultural trade policy. Ditto with his wish to “internalize negative social and environmental externalities”: on the face of it, this is a fairly inoffensive goal, and a positively noble one if he is referring to, say, the effects on poor farmers abroad stemming from rich country farm subsidies. But I can see all sorts of nefarious social policies flowing from that prescription if it gets into the wrong hands.
Lamy goes on to make sensible points about the effects of tax policy on agriculture, and makes this statement about the importance of free trade for food security:
To my mind, global integration allows us to think of efficiency beyond national boundaries. It allows us to score efficiency gains on a global scale by shifting agricultural production to where it can best take place. As I often say, if a country such as Egypt were to aim for self-sufficiency in agriculture, it would soon need more than one River Nile. Which basically means that global integration must also allow food, feed, and fibre to travel from countries where they are efficiently produced to countries where there is demand.
All necessary, if not sufficient, conditions for global food security, to be sure. But Lamy then turns to exactly what a global vision for agriculture might involve:
I believe that we could all agree on what the basic objectives are that we seek from our agricultural systems. We all want sufficient food, feed, fibre and some even want fuel. We want nutritious food and feed. We want safe food and feed. We want a decent and rising living standard for our farmers. We want food to be available and affordable for the consumer. We want agricultural production systems that are in tune with local culture and customs, and that respect the environment throughout a product’s entire life-cycle.
Hmm. I’m not sure about all that. For one thing, some of those goals seem potentially in conflict. United States sugar policy, for example, has shown us the results when consumers’ desire for “affordable” food conflicts with sugar farmers’ desire for a “decent and rising living standard” (hint: it’s not the consumers who make out like bandits). Similarly, it is at least conceivable that food grown “in tune with local culture and customs” might be more expensive, or make food less abundant, or even less safe. And if those goals can be in conflict within a country’s borders, I shudder to think what such an overburdened agenda could do to the already-struggling global trading system. At the extreme, a call for a “global vision” of agricultural trade policy could see the return of international commodity agreements and other supranational management nightmares of the mid-late 20th century.
On balance, the WTO has been a force for good in freeing agricultural trade. For sure, commodity markets are still very distorted, and the whole mercantilist basis of the WTO must be questioned. But by trying to harness the desire of exporters for more customers to counteract the pressure on governments to protect domestic industries, the WTO has done much good in the world. Pascal Lamy is right to encourage countries to stay on course with the Doha round of trade negotiations. I just hope that encouraging a “global vision” for agriculture, and pointing to vague notions of “social externalities,” doesn’t run against his stated purpose of freeing farm trade.
More on Cato’s work on agricultural trade policy here.
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