Going back to the 1980s, I've always seen the peanut breath in the GATT/WTO coming from China's status as a developing nation when it was the manufacturing engine of the world.
This created a massive distortion of trade by insulating China's industry from external competition and attracting US and EU manufacturers to set up in China. It certainly led to the de-industrialization of much of the west, with the free market fundamentalist (FMF) economists arguing that this was a post-industrial economy which was superior to an industrialized economy. Perhaps they envisaged a service based economy like Switzerland's no questions asked banking system, and some smaller countries, buoyed by the FMF's mantra of "privatization, globalization, deregulation, and incentivization", adopted this model, which facilitated tax evasion and the covert transfer of ill-gotten riches.
If I'm not mistaken, the classification of a country on the "developed" scale was a choice of each individual country. China benefitted from the WTO more than the rest of he world combined by classifying itself as "developing" while being the largest manufacturer. Now there is the population divisor to be taken into account, but this formula, aided by the ideology of the FMFs, produced the massive distortion which decimated western manufacturing.
So I see merit in Trump's argument that global trade is distorted. I disagree with his remedy.
Edit: The FMFs did not just throw out the baby with the bathwater, the tub went too!
This created a massive distortion of trade by insulating China's industry from external competition and attracting US and EU manufacturers to set up in China. It certainly led to the de-industrialization of much of the west, with the free market fundamentalist (FMF) economists arguing that this was a post-industrial economy which was superior to an industrialized economy. Perhaps they envisaged a service based economy like Switzerland's no questions asked banking system, and some smaller countries, buoyed by the FMF's mantra of "privatization, globalization, deregulation, and incentivization", adopted this model, which facilitated tax evasion and the covert transfer of ill-gotten riches.
If I'm not mistaken, the classification of a country on the "developed" scale was a choice of each individual country. China benefitted from the WTO more than the rest of he world combined by classifying itself as "developing" while being the largest manufacturer. Now there is the population divisor to be taken into account, but this formula, aided by the ideology of the FMFs, produced the massive distortion which decimated western manufacturing.
So I see merit in Trump's argument that global trade is distorted. I disagree with his remedy.
Edit: The FMFs did not just throw out the baby with the bathwater, the tub went too!
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