Quick Hits
Things you might find interesting, but I haven’t had the time or inclination to blog about:
- Do you ever wonder about China’s always positive economic statistics? I have long thought they are too good to be true, so I generally ignore them in thinking about business plans for China. My suspicions appear to be well-placed, but don’t take my word for it. Take a look at Gordon Chang’s October 23 column in Forbes. Don’t know why I missed it at the time, but it is still a timely read.
- I posted early in November about the WTO case brought against China for restricting exports of important raw materials. The case was brought by the European Union, the United States and Mexico after bilateral talks with China broke down. The first step in a WTO case, after bilaterals, is to request that a panel of experts be established to review the charges, counter-charges and facts of the case. Last Thursday, China vetoed establishment of such a panel, as it has the right to do under WTO procedures. That won’t delay things for long as the complainants can ask again and the request can only be vetoed once. The next opportunity to ask for a panel comes at a meeting in Geneva on December 21.
- The WTO did set up a panel Thursday to look at a complaint by the United States about a European Union ban on imports of American poultry. The EU says that U.S. poultry treated with an antimicrobial chlorine rinse is unsafe. Washington says that the EU action is protectionist and unscientific. A second panel was created to address Canadian and Mexican complaints against U.S. country of origin labeling rules for meat. This is all normal stuff and sure beats trade wars.
- The National Foreign Trade Council called last Tuesday for Congress to streamline the various preferential programs the United States uses to help developing countries. Let’s see, we have the Generalized System of Preferences, the Caribbean Basin Initiative, special programs for Africa – and probably others I don’t know about. They all seem to run for different periods, expire at different times, and Congress never acts on them until the last possible second. (GSP is due to expire the end of next month.) Streamlining and combining seems to make sense. Nothing kills business more than uncertainty, and uncertainty is what we’ve got.
