Trade Archive

On June 26, Mongolians will go to the polls to elect their next president, with incumbent Tsakhia Elbegdorj predicted to return to office with a renewed mandate. His principal challenge comes from B. Bat-Erdene, who maintains a strong base of populist support in Mongolia’s rural areas. The third candidate, Natsag Udval, is a staunch supporter of former President Nambar Enkybayar, currently serving a two-and-a-half year jail term on corruption charges. According to Julian Dierkes, a Mongolia expert at the University of British Colombia, Udval is unlikely to gain more than 5 percent of the vote, but her candidacy is noteworthy […]

This week, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang visited India in his first official overseas trip, vowing to enhance bilateral trade relations and ease tensions in the wake of a recent border dispute between the two countries. In an email interview, Arvind Panagariya, a professor of economics and Indian political economy at Columbia University, explained the recent trajectory of India-China trade relations. WPR: What is the current state of trade relations between India and China, including the value of bilateral trade, balance of trade and major sectors, as well as the priority both sides place on bilateral trade? Arvind Panagariya: Bilateral trade […]

As President Barack Obama learned during his whirlwind trip to Mexico in early May 2013, President Enrique Pena Nieto, like his predecessors, is eager to lessen his nation’s security, economic and trade dependence on the United States. During the visit, the U.S. chief executive discussed economic cooperation, education, border infrastructure, migration and the drug war. “We’ve done a lot of work with the previous Mexican administration on security issues and on economic issues. But sometimes the relationship gets characterized just as being about borders or just about drug cartels,” Obama told the Spanish-language network Telemundo. Proximity, joint assembly ventures, and […]

At their White House summit last week, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and U.S. President Barack Obama reaffirmed the two countries’ “model partnership” as they jointly called for greater international efforts to end the Syrian War. Thus far, the Arab Spring has had an overall positive effect on the Turkey-U.S. relationship. Before 2011, the Turkish-U.S. policy discourse focused on their divisions over Iraq, Iran and other regional security issues. But since the Arab Spring, Ankara and Washington have been preoccupied with harmonizing their policies toward the Arab world. This has become increasingly difficult with regard to Syria. Meanwhile, the […]

U.S. President Barack Obama welcomed President Thein Sein of Myanmar to the White House on Monday, praising Thein Sein’s leadership in moving his country “down a path of both political and economic reform.” That progress, Obama said, has allowed for the recent “shift in relations” between the U.S. and Myanmar. Vikram Nehru, a senior associate in the Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Trend Lines the visit underlines how far the Southeast Asian country has come. Nehru said the progress in Myanmar is real, but that the country’s leaders have so far delivered more political than […]

Does international trade liberalization reduce poverty? The question is an important and relevant one. It was high on the agenda in the late-1990s—think of the Seattle riots against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1999—and after a decade or so of quiescence it is starting to worry policymakers again. Fortunately, it permits a fairly definite answer, one that surprises many people. While there clearly are exceptions, the answer is “in the long run and on average, almost always, yes, trade liberalization reduces poverty.” The terms “long run” and “average” are not weasel words, but they do mask a lot of […]