World Perspectives

More to Burn, Less Trade

As the border carbon tax idea picks up steam it leads to all kinds of possibilities for expanding use of border measures to extract policy changes. One target being discussed is the treatment of women, but they could be expanded to policy measures that distort trade, such as labor laws, tax policies, government subsidies, and exchange rate policies. After all, these distort the terms of trade such as productivity, trade costs, and supply. Why should using the lever of trade be limited to just climate change?  Much as it becomes apparent in climate change policy, distorted use of the underlying data can create arbitrary outcomes. Brazil is criticized for loss of rainforests. Brazil is 62 percent forested, one of the highest in the worl...

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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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