Perpetuating Dependence Members of the African Union want the EU to subsidize Africa’s capacity for producing value-added goods, and then they want Europe to import the resulting products. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is saying that Europe could concede better preferential access for goods from the richer countries in Africa, something currently reserved just for the poorer ones. The EU will be making a mistake if it does not mimic the U.S. in insisting that African countries also improve the access they give to imports. The WTO is in trouble because years ago rich countries granted preferential terms without reciprocity to the vast majority of the organization’s members. That majority now refuses to ever grant more balanced...
Key Market Insights The broad market is locked in on this week’s Trump-Xi meeting in Beijing, but this is no longer just a trade summit. Increasingly, the meeting is becoming tied directly to Iran, energy security, and the growing global economic fallout from disruptions through the Strai...
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.