IPEF Reality President Biden’s launch of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework is a confusing mess but is unlikely to be what the Chinese are calling “a strategy for destroying peace.” This CPTPP-lite plan talks about trade using the same language as CPTPP: “free, open, fair, inclusive, interconnected…high-standard…free and fair trade,” but the focus for increasing trade links is on nontariff barriers that are difficult politically for countries to remove and easy for them to restore. Especially when there is no mention of an enforcement mechanism. The Chinese say it is destined to fail but the bar for success if already is low. Moreover, it would effectively be meaningless if Singapore succeeds in...
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.