Trading Conflicts

Based on Mamluk and Venetian sources, this book offers a thorough analysis of the various conflicts arising around Levant trade. It demonstrates how these conflicts more often than not cut across cultural divides in Late Medieval Mamluk Alexandria.

Conflicts over currency valuations are a recurrent feature of the modern global economy. To strengthen their international competitiveness, many countries resort to buying foreign currencies to make their exports cheaper and their imports more expensive. In the first decade of the 21st century, for example, China's currency manipulation practices were so flagrant that they produced a backlash in the United States and other trading partners, prompting threats of retaliation. How damaging is the practice of currency manipulation—and how extensive is the problem? This book by C. Fred Bergsten and Joseph E. Gagnon—two leading experts on trade, investment, and the effects of currency manipulation—traces the history, causes, and effects of currency manipulation and analyzes a range of policy responses that the United States could adopt. The book is an indispensable guide to a complex and serious problem and what might be done to solve it.

Violent conflict weakens governance, undermines economic development and threatens both national and regional stability. Trade shocks can also have stark impact on conflict. This book sets out to empirically test these linkages between trade shocks and conflict via cross-country and intra-country analysis.

Analysing different conflicts in Late Medieval Alexandria, this book offers new insights into the micro-mechanics of Venetian life and trade in Egypt and recalibrates the narrative of the strictly regulated and often violent contacts between East and West. This thorough microanalysis, based on the private archive of a Venetian merchant and consul in Alexandria read in conjunction with other Venetian and Mamluk sources, provides a differentiated image of conflict patterns cutting across the cultural divide. It transforms our image of Alexandria as a city at the intersection of Orient and Occident into that of a microcosm in its own right where disputes did not always fall neatly along cultural divides and conflicts were traded as much as trade created conflicts.

The Estey Centre Journal of International Law and Trade Policy has become required reading among trade policy specialists, not least for Bill Kerr's "Editor's Pages" essay in each volume. Kerr has the ability in a dozen pages to engage, inform and entertain the reader with his careful scholarship, interesting choice of topic and highly-readable style. Kerr sets the tone for the volume and whets the appetite for the other articles. Over the ten years of the Estey Journal's life Kerr's pages have drawn our attention to a range of trade-law topics from the golf-club-like voting rules of the WTO to the delights of sipping incorrectly-labeled port. The decision to bring these twenty short papers together in a volume was inspired. Students and teachers will benefit from the convenience of the collection as source material for classes on trade law and policy. But above all, scholars in the fascinating area of the interplay of economics and law in multilateral trade institutions will have the wisdom of Bill Kerr readily to hand.

This paper examines the spatial dispersion effects of regional conflicts, defined as internal or external armed conflicts in contiguous states, on international trade. Our empirical findings-based on different measures of conflict constructed using alternate definitions of contiguity and conflict-reveal a significant collateral damage in terms of foregone trade as a result of spillovers from conflict in neighboring countries. The magnitude of this negative externality is somewhat larger for international conflicts than intrastate warfare, but about one-third of conflict in the host economies. Further, the impact is persistent-on average, it takes bilateral trade three years to recover from the end of intrastate conflicts in neighboring states, and five years from international conflicts. These findings are robust to alternate definitions of conflict, estimation methods, and specifications, and underscore the importance of taking into account spillover effects when estimating the economic costs of warfare.

This book unveils a potent new approach to one of the oldest debates in political economy--that over whether class conflict or group competition is more prevalent in politics. It goes further than any study to date by outlining the conditions under which one type of political conflict is more likely than the other. Michael Hiscox focuses on a critical issue affecting support for and opposition to free trade--factor mobility, or the ability of those who own a factor of production (land, labor, or capital) to move it from one industry to another. He argues that the types of political coalitions that form in trade politics depend largely on the extent to which factors are mobile between industries. Class coalitions are more likely where factor mobility is high, Hiscox demonstrates, whereas narrow, industry-based coalitions predominate where it is low. The book also breaks new ground by backing up the theory it advances with systematic evidence from the history of trade politics in six nations over the last two centuries, using a combination of case studies and quantitative analysis. It makes fresh conclusions about the forces shaping trade policy outcomes--conclusions that yield surprising insights into the likely evolution of the global trading system and U.S. trade policy in particular. International Trade and Political Conflict is a major contribution to the scholarly literature while being accessible to anyone interested in understanding and predicting developments in trade policy.

Agricultural trade, always a source of international friction, will remain a contentious issue in the years to come. The GATT agreement achieved only partial trade liberalization; recognizing this, the agreement calls for a continuation of the negotiation process to achieve the long-run goal of a “substantial reduction in agricultural support and protection.†In any case, it is clear that U.S.-European Union (EU) agricultural trade relations will remain central to any future negotiation. In this volume, leading experts present a comprehensive set of analyses of the U.S.-EU agricultural trade conflict. The discussions provide a unique perspective on the U.S.-EU agricultural trade confrontation in recent years and offer insights into both the final GATT agreement and forthcoming agricultural issues. Presenting a broad historical context, the book focuses on changes in U.S. and European trade and agricultural policies, looking at the implications of these changes for bilateral relations and global agricultural markets. Providing U.S., EU, and third-party perspectives, the contributors analyze the negotiation process in the Uruguay Round of the GATT. Finally, the book explores several additional dimensions of the U.S.-EU agricultural trade conflict, including the consequences of the EU integration and enlargement processes, the environmental impact of the Union’s agricultural policies, and the mechanisms and forces that determine agricultural policy formation in both the United States and in Europe.