World Perspectives

Protectionism and Discharges

SEA Case Study Two Southeast Asian neighbors are going to provide yet another example of which economic model works better: market capitalism or protectionism. Indonesian agricultural economist Bustanil Arifin says his country will never have food self-reliance and food sovereignty as long as there is easy access to imported products. The government has taken these arguments to heart by reintroducing barriers to trade. By contrast, next-door neighbor Malaysia has moved up to number 18 on the World Bank's Doing Business indicators, versus number 129 for Indonesia. And Malaysia is a negotiating party in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). These two countries will provide another case study to be ignored by other countries at their peril...

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From WPI Consulting

Communicating importance of value-added products

Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.

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