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In RealTime posts, PIIE senior staff and colleagues discuss the fast-moving economic news, financial developments, and public policy choices confronting the United States and the world.
Sometimes it takes a narrow lens to distinguish the true features of big objects. The future of financial globalization, whatever one’s perspective on its dangers or merits, is one of the biggest questions of our times. By contrast, accounting is often perceived as a boring technique. But the policy debate on accounting and especially on [...]
A rancorous debate is taking place over whether to link reauthorization and reform of Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA)—which provides assistance to workers, farmers, fishermen, and firms adversely affected by increased import competition and offshore shifts in production—to other legislation moving through Congress. Given TAA’s small size, the issue isn’t whether to link it or not, [...]
The decision by the United States to slap a 35 percent tariff on tire imports from China is, of course, significant. It follows a decision last week by the US Department of Commerce to impose countervailing duties on imports of steel pipe from Chinese firms. In the world of the 24/7 news cycle, one trade [...]
We tend to think of globalization in the following way: the rich world exports financial capital, technology, sophisticated goods, and entrepreneurial and managerial skills in the form of foreign direct investment (FDI) to developing countries; the latter, in turn, export people, resources, and low-skilled goods to the rich world. Well, it turns out that globalization [...]
Are multinational corporations in the United States relocating their manufacturing sites overseas, abandoning workers and communities at home? And are their investments abroad “hollowing out” America’s productive capacity? At a time of global economic and financial turmoil, these questions are as controversial as ever. The 2008 election rekindled the debate over the practices of multinational [...]
One definition of globalization is the integration of economies and financial markets. By that definition, globalization has increased steadily since World War II. International trade has expanded more rapidly than global output, and cross-border financial flows have increased more rapidly than international trade—albeit with larger and deeper reversals. This process of global integration has been [...]