Baltic Rim Economies 4/2022
Special issue on Trade Policy
Published on the 31st of October 2022
U.S. trade policies post-Trump
“The world had its highest rate of economic growth from the end of the Second World War until the middle of the last decade. Almost all economies shared in growth well above the historical average and the number of people in poverty fell drastically.”
Anne O. Krueger
Former First Deputy Managing Director
International Monetary Fund
Senior Research Professor
School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University
USA
Senior Fellow
Stanford Center for International Development (SCID)
USA
The WTO delivers a bountiful result – but what’s next?
“Early in the Geneva morning of 17th June, the WTO’s twelfth Ministerial meeting – MC12 – came to a close. The agreed package, hammered out over four days and two nights of intense negotiations, actually concluded four and a half years of negotiations since the last ministerial gathering held in Buenos Aires in 2017.”
Mikael Anzén
Sweden’s Ambassador to the WTO
Fragile international relations, trade, and policy
“The past few years have witnessed that nothing is as permanent as change. It seems that our global economies have faced new crises increasingly frequently. Just as we have been able to take a breath and have gained a flicker of the new normal, yet another disruption shakes our renewed balance. The global financial crisis in 2008, followed by the US–China trade war, global Covid-19 pandemic and the Russia’s invasion to Ukraine, have all shaken the global structures that govern the increasingly interconnected trade. As the growth of global trade has brought us welfare and increased living standards, it has also brought us increasingly interconnected and diverse international relations.”
Anna Karhu
Research Manager
Pan-European Institute (PEI), Turku School of Economics, University of Turku
Finland
Some new realities in international trade
“Trade and economic sanctions imposed on Russia are unprecedented not only in their scope, but also in their non-compliance with the basic rules of the WTO. These rules are based on the principle of non-discrimination, they also prohibit to introduce trade bans and other restrictions of trade. If the Russian government decides to challenge these sanctions in the WTO arbitration, Western trade lawyers will obviously have to work hard trying to justify these bans by the WTO security exceptions. These exceptions allow WTO members to violate basic rules in limited number of cases. It would be necessary for lawyers to demonstrate that all these bans and restrictions in trade with Russia were taken for the protection of’ “essential security interests” of the countries which introduced sanctions.”
Maxim Medvedkov
Higher School of Economics
Moscow, Russia