Abstract
During his primary campaign, President Obama took an aggressive stance on trade, suggesting a protectionist drift in U.S. trade policy. However, it seems more likely that policy will focus more on enforcement of existing rights than on protectionist initiatives. The major influences on trade policy are likely to be multilateral approaches to trade problems, broad foreign policy concerns, the impact of trade policy on recovery from the current recession, and global climate change initiatives. Holdover initiatives on the World Trade Organization's Doha round and bilateral agreements will be joined by global climate change as the principal policy issues for the next few years.
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Notes
Infrastructure projects funded by the $787 billion stimulus legislation passed in February 2009 are often tendered by state and local government officials, who discriminate against foreign suppliers for fear of losing the federal windfalls. Obama's pledge to comply with U.S. trade obligations has been honored in the breach. For a fuller discussion of this problem, see Hufbauer and Schott [2009].
References
Hufbauer, Gary, and Schott, Jeffrey, 2009. “America's Free Trade Promises Must Be Honoured.” Financial Times, May 20.
Additional information
Presented at National Association for Business Economics 25th Annual Washington Economic Policy Conference. March 2, 2009.
*Jeffrey J. Schott joined the Peterson Institute for International Economics in 1983 and is a senior fellow working on international trade policy and economic sanctions. During his tenure at the Institute, Schott has also been a visiting lecturer at Princeton University (1994) and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University (1986–88). He was a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (1982–83) and an official of the U.S. Treasury Department (1974–82) in international trade and energy policy. During the Tokyo Round of multilateral trade negotiations, he was a member of the U.S. delegation that negotiated the GATT Subsidies Code. Since January 2003, he has been a member of the Trade and Environment Policy Advisory Committee of the U.S. government. He is also a member of the Advisory Committee on International Economic Policy of the U.S. Department of State. Schott holds a BA degree magna cum laude from Washington University, St. Louis (1971), and an MA degree with distinction in international relations from the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University (1973).
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Schott, J. Trade Policy and the Obama Administration. Bus Econ 44, 150–153 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/be.2009.15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/be.2009.15