Latest in World Trade Organization
As the Biden administration reconsiders the role of industrial policy in the U.S. economy, it will need to ask whether the United States should follow WTO rules even if it believes they cannot be enforced against others.
Face-to-face trade negotiations resumed this week between representatives of the United States and China for the first time since President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to restart talks in June. U.S.
Last week, Chinese Vice Premier Liu He met with U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Robert Lighthizer in the latest in a series of high-level conversations designed to de-escalate trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies. The vice premier, President Xi Jinping’s top economic adviser, has a reputation as an economic reformer interested in liberalizing China’s economy, which provides some hope that the parties will finally resolve the simmering trade war.
This is the fourth post in a series. Read the first three parts here, here and here.
A surprise announcement from European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and President Donald Trump on Wednesday may be the first hint of a cease-fire in the trade war that the United States initiated when it imposed national-security-premised tariffs this spring. The initial outlook for Juncker’s visit was not good. Still, he and Trump unveiled plans to “work together toward zero tariffs, zero non-tariff barriers, and zero subsidies on non-auto industrial goods,” “to reform the WTO” and to “resolve” the recent steel and aluminum tariffs, among other collaborations.