WTO Outlook USTR Katherine Tai last week described the WTO’s 13th Ministerial Conference scheduled for next February to be the first “reform ministerial.” However, she recognizes that U.S. ambitions such as increasing transparency, addressing non-market economies and fixing dispute settlement will likely take longer. She sees the role of MC13 as “setting ourselves up for success at the next milestone, which will take place at MC14 in Cameroon.” However, getting agreement on changing the rules for non-market economies is probably a non-starter. And developing countries see the push by the EU and U.S. to have the WTO address climate change as an effort to impose trade restrictions such as the carbon border measu...
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.