Sovereignty’s Trap Beijing, Brussels, Washington, and other capitals are using the pandemic to rationalize a rush toward national self-sufficiency, but it will not be without a price. The ultimate poster child for having very short supply chains is Argentina. Peronists have spent decades perfecting import substitution schemes with the result being very little external competition, and thus relatively unsophisticated manufacturing. Argentina is now uncompetitive in about everything except agriculture, and now this main source of foreign exchange is threatened this year by drought. The rush to reshoring could slow global productivity gains and thus real economic growth for years to come. Sustainability’s Trap U.S. Represe...
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.