World Perspectives

Partially Right, Partially Wrong; Fake versus Natural Fix; AGOAnizing over Trade

Partially Right, Partially Wrong Hiroshige Seko, Japan’s top political leader at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), correctly asserted today that his country’s automobile industry is a major contributor to the U.S. economy. Japanese companies have not only brought manufacturing jobs to the U.S., but they forced American manufacturers to greatly improve the products they sell at home and abroad. However, the minister misspoke on two fronts. He expressed empathy for Trump’s “feelings” of concern about the U.S. trade deficit, which is a symbolic proxy for imbalanced trading terms and not an issue itself. Second, he reportedly said that President Trump’s tariff policies “reflect a seri...

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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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