VOX  CEPR Policy Portal

Like other countries participating in the multilateral trading system, China agreed to limit the use of import tariffs when it joined the WTO. As this column shows, however, it continued to employ other instruments of trade policy, including a new set of restrictions on exports which partly restored the asymmetric treatment of Chinese industries embodied in its pre-WTO import tariffs. Today's tariff wars appear to be just the latest example of an ongoing battle whose skirmishes have taken many forms.

A new book from the CEPR argues that the current trade war is a long-term danger to all economies, not just those of the US and China. Editor Meredith Crowley of the University of Cambridge and two of the authors tell Tim Phillips why prospects for the world economy are 'grim'.

The next G20 Leaders’ Summit risks being overshadowed by the Sino-US Trade War. That needn’t happen as last year G20 Leaders called for reports on options to revive the WTO and are expected to discuss them in Osaka. This column introduces the latest Global Trade Alert report, which shows that current global trade rules don’t deliver and proposes a way forward. 

The recent success of China and Vietnam over the past three decades has triggered a debate over ‘state capitalism’ as a viable growth and development model. This column studies the effect of the 2007 WTO accession on the productivity, profitability, and survival rates of state-owned and private Vietnamese firms. The findings reveal that state-owned enterprises have hampered the efficiency gains brought about by globalisation. An analysis suggests that productivity gains from trade five years after WTO entry might have been 66% higher in the absence of state-owned firms.

EU and the UK production networks are highly integrated, and Brexit poses a threat to supply and demand linkages between the two economies. This column describes how the effect of tariffs will be magnified due to back-and-forth trade across the Channel. This will increase production costs in the UK and, to a lesser extent, in the EU.

Developing countries have not participated in the WTO-led negotiations aimed at bringing down barriers to trade in environmental goods. If negotiations conclude, would the win for trade and for the environment be extended to a win for developing countries? This column draws insights from a newly assembled comprehensive dataset on barriers to trade in environmental goods and provides evidence that tariffs and non-tariff barriers are still an impediment to trade while similar regulations stimulate it. A larger list of environmental goods would entice developing-country participation, but this will also require protecting developing countries from challenges at the WTO.

Uncertainty over the future of the world trading system is at its highest since the introduction of GATT in 1947. The US-China trade war and suggestions that President Trump intends to withdraw the US from the WTO have significantly raised uncertainty in the global economy. Meanwhile, uncertainty over the future of the UK-EU trading relationship spiked on 15 January when the UK parliament overwhelmingly rejected the negotiated terms of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU. This column documents that an earlier period of heightened trade policy uncertainty for the UK – the period following the Brexit referendum in June 2016 – depressed the UK’s international trading activity, with some UK businesses choosing to not enter the EU market while others chose to exit. 

The Trump administration’s recent tariff increases have prompted comparisons to interwar tariff history. This column investigates tariffs during this period, drawing out lessons on their macroeconomic impacts for the US and its trade partners. The recessionary impact of recent tariffs is likely to be smaller and less widespread than those imposed during the interwar period, provided that tariff levels don’t escalate too dramatically through retaliation.