The U.S. and Kenya announced yesterday the initiation of bilateral free trade talks under the rules of the Trade Promotion Authority law. The U.S. wants it to be the first of several with African countries. Per the Legatum Institute, the African continent is the most prosperous it has ever been. Unlike Argentina, which is relatively poorer than in its past, each region in Africa is improving, even if at a slow pace. In part this is due to improved institutions and governance. While South Africa is the only semi-prosperous country south of the Sahara, at least six countries on the continent itself qualify as emerging, including Kenya. Mauritius is top ranked, but the island only has one million people. East Africa is outperforming oth...
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.