Category: Economics for Business: Ch 24

An agreement in principle was reached on September 30 between the USA, Canada and Mexico over a new trade deal to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). President Trump had described NAFTA as ‘the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere, but certainly ever signed in this country.’ The new deal, named the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, is the result of 14 months of negotiations, which have often been fractious. A provisional bilateral agreement was made between the USA and Mexico in August. At the same time, President Trump threatened a trade war with Canada if it did not reach a trade agreement with the USA (and Mexico). The new USMCA must be ratified by lawmakers in all three countries before it can come into force. This could take a few months.

So is USMCA a radical departure from NAFTA? Does the USA stand to gain substantially, as President Trump claims? In fact, USMCA is little different from NAFTA. It could best be described as a relatively modest reworking of NAFTA. So what are the changes?

The first change affects the car industry. From 2020, 75% of the components of any vehicle crossing between the USA and Canada or Mexico must be made within one or more of the three countries to qualify for tariff-free treatment. The aim is to boost production within the region. But the main change here is merely an increase in the proportion from the current 62.5%.

A more significant change affecting the car industry concerns wages. Between 40% and 45% of a vehicle’s components must be made by workers earning at least US$16 per hour. This is some three times more than the average wage currently earned by Mexican car workers. Although it will benefit such workers, it will reduce Mexico’s competitive advantage and could hence lead to some diversion of production away from Mexico. Also, it could push up the price of cars.

The agreement has also strengthened various standards inadequately covered in NAFTA. According to The Conversation article:

The new agreement includes stronger protections for patents and trademarks in areas such as biotech, financial services and domain names – all of which have advanced considerably over the past quarter century. It also contains new provisions governing the expansion of digital trade and investment in innovative products and services.
 
Separately, negotiators agreed to update labor and environmental standards, which were not central to the 1994 accord and are now typical in modern trade agreements. Examples include enforcing a minimum wage for autoworkers, stricter environmental standards for Mexican trucks and lots of new rules on fishing to protect marine life.

Another area where the USMCA agreement has made changes concerns trade in dairy products. This particularly affects Canada, which has agreed to allow more US dairy products tariff-free into Canada (see the CNN article at the end of the list of articles below). New higher quotas will give US dairy farmers access to 3.6% of Canada’s dairy market. They will still pay tariffs on dairy exports to Canada that exceed the quotas, ranging from 200% to 300%.

The other significant change for consumers in Mexico and Canada is a rise in the value of duty-free imports they can bring in from the USA, including online transactions. As the first BBC article listed below states:

The new agreement raises duty-free shopping limits to $100 to enter Mexico and C$150 ($115) to enter Canada without facing import duties – well above the $50 previously allowed in Mexico and C$20 permitted by Canada. That’s good news for online shoppers in Mexico and Canada – as well as shipping firms and e-commerce companies, especially giants like Amazon.

Despite these changes, USMCA is very similar to NAFTA. It is still a preferential trade deal between the three countries, but certainly not a completely free trade deal – but nor was NAFTA.

And for the time being, US tariffs on Mexican and Canadian steel and aluminium imports remain in place. Perhaps, with the conclusion of the USMCA agreement, the Trump administration will now, as promised, consider lifting these tariffs.

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Questions

  1. What have been the chief gains and losses for the USA from USMCA?
  2. What have been the chief gains and losses for Mexico from USMCA?
  3. What have been the chief gains and losses for Canada from USMCA?
  4. What are the economic gains from free trade?
  5. Why might a group of countries prefer a preferential trade deal with various restrictions on trade rather than a completely free trade deal between them?
  6. Distinguish between trade creation and trade diversion.
  7. In what areas, if any, might USMCA result in trade diversion?
  8. If the imposition of tariffs results in a net loss from a decline in trade, why might it be in the interests of a country such as the USA to impose tariffs?

I admit it, the title of my blog today is a little bit misleading – but at the same time very appropriate for today’s topic. Nancy Sinatra certainly wasn’t thinking about emigration when she was singing this song – it had nothing to do with it, after all. It is, however, very relevant to economists: Indeed, there are many economics papers discussing the effects of skilled immigration on host and source economies and regions.

Economists often use the term ‘brain drain’ to describe the migration of highly skilled workers from poor/developing to rich/developed economies. Such flows are anything but unusual. As The Economist points out in a recent article, ‘[I]n the decade to 2010–11 the number of university-educated migrants in the G20, a group of large economies that hosts two-thirds of the world’s migrants, grew by 60% to 32m according to the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries.’.

The effects of international migration are found to be overwhelmingly positive for both skilled migrant workers and their hosts. This is particularly true for highly skilled workers (such as academics, physicians and other professionals), who, through emigration, get the opportunity to earn a significantly higher return on their skills that what they might have had in their home country. Very often their home country is saturated and oversupplied with skilled workers competing for a very limited number of jobs. Also, they get the opportunity to practise their profession – which they might not have had otherwise.

But what about their home countries? Are they worse off for such emigration?

There are different views when it comes to answering this question. One argument is that the prospect of international migration incentivises people in developing countries to accumulate skills (brain gain) – which they might not choose to do otherwise, if the expected return to skills was not high enough to warrant the effort and opportunity cost that comes with it. Beine et al (2011) find that:

Our empirical analysis predicts conditional convergence of human capital indicators. Our findings also reveal that skilled migration prospects foster human capital accumulation in low-income countries. In these countries, a net brain gain can be obtained if the skilled emigration rate is not too large (i.e. it does not exceed 20–30% depending on other country characteristics). In contrast, we find no evidence of a significant incentive mechanism in middle-income, and not surprisingly, high-income countries.

Other researchers find that emigration can have a significant negative effect on source economies (countries or regions) – especially if it affects a large share of the local workforce within a short time period. Ha et al (2016), analyse the effect of emigration on human capital formation and economic growth of Chinese provinces:

First, we find that permanent emigration is conducive to the improvement of both middle and high school enrollment. In contrast, while temporary emigration has a significantly positive effect on middle school enrollment it does not affect high school enrollment. Moreover, the different educational attainments of temporary emigrants have different effects on school enrollment. Specifically, the proportion of temporary emigrants with high school education positively affects middle school enrollment, while the proportion of temporary emigrants with middle school education negatively affects high school enrollment. Finally, we find that both permanent and temporary emigration has a detrimental effect on the economic growth of source regions.

So yes or no? Good or bad? As everything else in economics, the answer quite often is ‘it depends’.

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Questions

  1. ‘The brain drain makes a bad situation worse, by stripping developing economies of their most valuable assets: skilled workers’. Discuss.
  2. Using Google, find data on the inflows and outflows of skilled labour for a developing country of your choice. Explain your results.
  3. ‘Brain drain’ or ‘brain gain’? What is your personal view on this debate? Explain your opinion by using anecdotal evidence, personal experience and examples.
  4. Referring to the previous question, write a critique of your answer.

Donald Trump has threatened to pull out of the World Trade Organization. ‘If they don’t shape up, I would withdraw from the WTO,’ he said. He argues that the USA is being treated very badly by the WTO and that the organisation needs to ‘change its ways’.

Historically, the USA has done relatively well compared with other countries in trade disputes brought to the WTO. However, President Trump does not like being bound by an international organisation which prohibits the unilateral imposition of tariffs that are not in direct retaliation against a trade violation by other countries. Such tariffs have been imposed by the Trump administration on steel and aluminium imports. This has led to retaliatory tariffs on US imports by the EU, China and Canada – something that is permitted under WTO rules.

Whether or not the USA does withdraw from the WTO, Trump’s threats bring into question the power of the WTO and other countries’ compliance with WTO rules. With the rise in protectionist sentiments around the world, the power of the WTO would seem to be on the wane.

Even if the USA does not withdraw from the WTO, it is succeeding in weakening the organisation. Appeals cases have to be heard by an ‘appellate body’, consisting of at least three judges drawn from a list of seven, each elected for four years. But the USA has the power to block new appointees – and has done so. As Larry Elliott states in the first article below:

The list of judges is already down to four and will be down to the minimum of three when the Mauritian member, Shree Baboo Chekitan Servansing, retires at the end of September. Two more members will go by the end of next year, at which point the appeals process will come to a halt.

This raises the question of the implication of a ‘no-deal’ Brexit – something that seems more likely as the UK struggles to reach a trade agreement with the EU. Leaving without a deal would mean ‘reverting to WTO rules’. But if these rules are being ignored by powerful countries such as the USA and possibly China, and if the appeals procedure has ground to a halt, this could leave the UK without the safety net of international trade rules. Outside the EU – the world’s most powerful trade bloc – the UK could find itself having to accept poor trade terms with the USA and other large countries.

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Questions

  1. Explain the WTO’s ‘Most-favoured-nation (MFN)’ clause. How would this affect trade deals between the UK and the EU?
  2. Would the trade deals that the EU has negotiated with other countries, such as Japan, be available to the UK after leaving the EU?
  3. Demonstrate how, according to the law of comparative advantage, all countries can gain from trade.
  4. In what ways is the USA likely to gain and lose from the imposition of tariffs on steel and aluminium?
  5. How could a country that supports free trade ever support the imposition of tariffs?
  6. Why are tariffs not the most serious restriction on trade?

The President of the United States, Donald Trump, announced recently that he will be pushing ahead with plans to impose a 25% tariff on imports of steel and a 10% tariff on aluminium. This announcement has raised concerns among the USA’s largest trading partners – including the EU, Canada and Mexico, which, according to recent calculations, expect to lose more than $5 billion in steel exports and over $1 billion in aluminium exports.

Source: Bown (2018), Figure 1

A number of economists and policymakers are worried that such policies restrict trade and are likely to provoke retaliation by the affected trade partners. In recent statements, the EU has pledged to take counter-measures if the bloc is affected by these policies. In a recent press conference, the Commissioner for Trade, Cecilia Malmstrom, stated that:

We have made it clear that a move that hurts the EU and puts thousands of European jobs in jeopardy will be met with a firm and proportionate response.

She added that, ‘I truly hope that this will not happen. A trade war has no winners.’

Why is everyone so worried about trade wars then? Trade wars, by definition, result in trade diversion which can hurt employment, wealth creation and overall economic performance in the affected countries. As affected states are almost certain to retaliate, these losses are likely to be felt by all parties that are involved in a trade war – including the one that instigated it. This results in a net welfare loss, the size of which depends on a number of factors, including the relative size of the countries that take part in the trade war, the importance of the affected industries to the local economy and others.

A number of studies have attempted to estimate the effect of trade restrictions and tariff wars on welfare: see for instance Anderson and Wincoop (2001), Syropoulos (2002), Fellbermayr et al. (2013). The results vary widely, depending on the case. However, there seems to be consensus that the more similar (in terms of size and industry composition) the adversaries are, the more mutually damaging a trade war is likely to be (and, therefore, less likely to happen).

As Miyagiwa et al (2016, p43) explain:

A country initiates contingent protection policy against a trading partner only if the latter has a considerably smaller domestic market than its own, while avoiding confrontation with a country having a substantially larger domestic market than its own.

As both Canada and the EU are very large advanced market economies, it remains to be seen how much risk (and potential damage to the local and global economy) US trade policymakers are willing to take.

Articles and Academic Papers

Questions

  1. Explain how trade diversion works and why it relates to economic prosperity.
  2. What are the key advantages of international trade?
  3. What are the key disadvantages of international trade?

TATA steelworks, Ijmuiden, Netherlands: photo JS

Since running for election, Donald Trump has vowed to ‘put America first’. One of the economic policies he has advocated for achieving this objective is the imposition of tariffs on imports which, according to him, unfairly threaten American jobs. On March 8 2018, he signed orders to impose new tariffs on metal imports. These would be 25% on steel and 10% on aluminium.

His hope is that, by cutting back on imports of steel and aluminium, the tariffs could protect the domestic industries which are facing stiff competition from the EU, South Korea, Brazil, Japan and China. They are also facing competition from Canada and Mexico, but these would probably be exempt provided negotiations on the revision of NAFTA rules goes favourably for the USA.

TATA steel works IJmuiden Netherlands (photo JS)Assuming there were no retaliation from other countries, jobs would be gained in the steel and aluminium industries. According to a report by The Trade Partnership (see link below), the tariffs would increase employment in these industries by around 33 000. However, the higher price of these metals would cause job losses in the industries using them. In fact, according to the report, more than five jobs would be lost for every one gained. The CNN Money article linked below gives example of the US industries that will be hit.

But the costs are likely to be much greater than this. Accorinding to the law of comparative advantage, trade is a positive-sum game, with a net gain to all parties engaged in trade. Unless trade restrictions are used to address a specific market distortion in the trade process itself, restricting trade will lead to a net loss in overall benefit to the parties involved.

Clearly there will be loss to steel and aluminium exporters outside the USA. There will also be a net loss to their countries unless these metals had a higher cost of production than in the USA, but were subsidised by governments so that they could be exported profitably.

Valancia port: photo JSBut perhaps the biggest cost will arise from possible retaliation by other countries. A trade war would compound the net losses as the world moves further from trade based on comparative advantage.

Already, many countries are talking about retaliation. For example, the EU is considering a ‘reciprocal’ tariff of 25% on cranberries, bourbon and Harley-Davidsons, all produced in politically sensitive US states (see the first The Economist article below). ‘As Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, puts it, “We can also do stupid”.’ In fact, this is quite a politically astute move to put pressure on Mr Trump.

But cannot countries appeal to the WTO? Possibly, but this route might take some time. What is more, the USA has attempted to get around WTO rules by justifying the tariffs on ‘national security’ grounds – something allowed under Article XXI of WTO rules, provided it can be justified. This could possibly deter countries from retaliating, but it is probably unlikely. In the current climate, there seems to be a growing mood for flouting, or at least loosely interpreting, WTO rules.

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Questions

  1. Explain how, by countries specialising in goods in which they have a comparative advantage, all countries can gain.
  2. Can tariffs or other trade restrictions ever be justified? Explain.
  3. Is there any economic justification for the US tariffs of 25% on steel and 10% on aluminium?
  4. Can putting tariffs on US imports be justified by countries whose steel and/or aluminium industires are faced with US tariffs?
  5. Can trade wars be won? Explain.