Senior fellow Arvind Subramanian was featured in a Wall Street Journal article on global trade negotiations.
From the Article
Trade economists would agree the Doha global trade round is dying, if it isn’t dead already. A new World Bank paper argues the way to revive the round is to refocus the negotiations on China.
The authors of the report (pdf), World Bank trade economist Aaditya Mattoo and Arvind Subramanian of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, say the reason that negotiators are having such trouble completing a deal is because the subject matter is largely irrelevant. What World Trade Organization members really want, they say, is a way to deal with China, which looms ever larger in global trading.
In areas covered by trade protection – apparel, footwear and the like – China’s share of imports into the U.S., Europe and other major nations “dwarfs that of any other supplier,” write Messrs. Mattoo and Subramanian. Thus, trade liberalization has become “increasingly about other countries opening their markets to Chinese exports.” Read it here.