Trade Archive

The continuing clashes between anti-government protesters and security forces in Venezuela are being watched with a view toward the national interest in Caribbean and Latin American countries, most notably Cuba, which is feeling the impact of the contest for Caracas with particular intensity. The fall of President Nicolas Maduro and the end of the policies instituted by his mentor, the late President Hugo Chavez, would have strong repercussions in the region. Even if Maduro holds on, the Chavista goal of exporting Venezuela’s “Bolivarian” revolution and bringing Chavez’s brand of “21st century socialism” to the rest of Latin America has already […]

Following a period of subdued and difficult relations between the European Union and China, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s first trip to Europe this week—which will include a stopover at the EU’s headquarters in Brussels, the first-ever such visit by a Chinese president—indicates that advances in ties made last year will continue into 2014. At the end of 2013, the two sides convened the High-Level Economic and Trade Dialogue for the first time since 2010, and the EU-China summit yielded a 2020 Strategic Agenda for Cooperation, a new EU-China Innovation Cooperation Dialogue and an agreement to launch negotiations on a bilateral […]

Twenty years ago it was fashionable in academic circles to predict the end of sovereignty. It was also fashionable for people to take to the streets to protest the end of sovereignty. In both cases, trade occupied a central role. For academics and policymakers, the transition from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), a messy, poorly defined system that was never an organization administering an agreement that was never a treaty, to the World Trade Organization (WTO), a carefully structured organization administering a phalanx of treaties, was a thing of wonder and the object of almost constant scrutiny. […]

Strengthening Britain’s bilateral relationships throughout Latin America has become a strategic priority under the U.K.’s current government. Nowhere is this more evident than in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, where recent visits by senior British officials highlight enhanced collaboration in the spheres of security and economic cooperation. Yet as Britain looks to build upon these successes, it must overcome some major hurdles if it is to truly unlock the wealth of potential opportunities available to it throughout the wider region. In February 2014, U.K. Foreign Secretary William Hague undertook his first official trip to Colombia, marking the latest episode in what […]

In the past few years, India has been strengthening its civil nuclear cooperation with countries bordering China. This trend, when taken together with India’s interest in marketing surface-to-surface missiles in Asia, clearly signals a shift in New Delhi’s policy stance. China’s latest wave of nuclear exceptionalism toward Pakistan seems to be pushing India to abandon its traditional self-imposed limits on trade in strategic technology, with the result that India is now willing to broaden strategic technology options for countries on China’s periphery in order to secure Indian geoeconomic interests. New Delhi’s approach is somewhat reminiscent of the early 1980s, when […]