Mother Country Can Show U.S. the Way

At a time when adding fuel to the economy should be an imperative for any political leader, UK Prime Minister David Cameron could take an important step for economic growth by spiffing up Britain’s creaky immigration rules and also enjoy the pleasure of showing the colonials how it’s done.

Based on …

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Rare Earths: Countering China

Beijing, intoxicated by double-digit growth even as the west slogs through hard times, seems inclined to flex its economic muscles these days. It chose to express its displeasure with Japan in a largely symbolic territorial dispute by embargoing exports of vital industrial minerals called “rare earths.” And, for a while, …

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Starve Thy Neighbor

Nice post by Harvard’s Jeff Frankel on the little-followed but surprisingly important issue of export control on food crops. The United States hasn’t tried to contain food prices by embargoing exports since Richard Nixon briefly stopped foreign sales of soybeans and set in motion the rise …

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Tangled Web

Ah, the glories of sugar politics… In case you missed it, the price of sugar in the US is up 30 percent in the last year. And, responding to heavy lobbying from commercial users of sucrose – mostly commercial bakeries and candy makers — the Department of Agriculture …

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Chinese Puzzle

You’ve heard it before, and you’ll hear it again: China’s insistence on maintaining an undervalued currency costs American jobs. But look a little closer – as Simon Evenett and Joseph Francois have done – and you’ll see that the story is much more complicated.

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Sweet Deal

The Competitive Enterprise Institute goes off the rails occasionally (as in “what climate change?”…), but the organization is right on the mark on the issue of import quotas for sugar. American cane and sugar beet growers, it seems, have lost a bit of their …

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Positive-Sum Game

Theodore Moran argues that China’s rush to “lock up” natural resources in other countries (think energy) will actually increase access for the rest of the world’s access – not decrease it.  We wish the Chinese understood the point, too; it would make them better citizens in the UN …

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