Friday December 3, 2021
12:30-1:30 p.m.
Online Zoom Meeting
Dear Colleagues:
Greetings, and I hope that you and yours are healthy and safe – and can stay that way.
As part of being careful to stay safe, the “Friday Lunch,” a CWRU tradition since 1989, continues on Zoom. We work to present experts from campus and sometimes beyond to discuss important issues for the university, local community, nation or the international stage.
Looking Forward to 2022!
This is the last program of 2021. We will meet again on January 14, 2022.
I do not yet know if it will make sense to try to return to in-person gatherings. Please feel free to send me your thoughts at joseph.white@case.edu.
I hope everyone who gets this newsletter had a wonderful Thanksgiving, and has a happy and a healthy holidays and a great start to the new year.
This Week’s Program
We end the Fall, 2021 semester with a look at the Biden administration’s policies on one of the signature themes of the Trump administration.
From World War II until very recently elites in both political parties, backed by an overwhelming consensus among economists, have viewed measures to expand trade as a forward-looking policy that would be good for the U.S. economy and for U.S. leadership in the world. This agreement peaked in the 1990s. President Clinton collaborated with congressional Republican leaders to implement the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that had been mostly negotiated by the George H.W. Bush Administration, and to pass the new General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). He later supported China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) created by the GATT. Clinton saw trade expansion as a way to create markets for U.S. products, and hoped (vainly) to compensate workers who lost their jobs with government spending such as Trade Adjustment Assistance. Lael Brainard – now President Biden’s nominee to be vice-chair of the Federal Reserve – described the Clinton administration’s record on trade as “very strong – perhaps not compared with the economist’s ideal of free trade but certainly compared with previous administrations facing similar political constraints.”
This elite consensus began to fall apart because of events. Most obviously, it became hard for some rather eminent economists who had been supporters of expanded trade not to notice that more and more imports were from low-wage countries and therefore were blowing out American manufacturing – so having major distributional effects within the U.S. This had to be a particular concern for Democrats, with their labor union base that historically had been particularly involved in manufacturing but was swiftly shrinking. Unions had opposed NAFTA and did not want further opening of their jobs to foreign competition.
But the Obama administration continued trying to expand trade through measures such as negotiating the draft Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). In contrast, Donald Trump made opposition to trade agreements, such as NAFTA and TPP, a core theme of his campaign. Labor/left economists such as Jeff Faux argued that the Clinton/Obama record on trade was a major reason Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. It is hard to believe that it was not a factor in states like Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The Trump administration did try to deliver on its promises to improve the terms of trade in ways that would help American workers. It imposed tariffs in the name of national security or “fairness” on a broad range of products, especially from China. It withdrew from the TPP (which nevertheless was signed by the remaining nations). It claimed to have negotiated a significant trade agreement with China (though the claim was highly questionable). Most visibly, Trump’s administration negotiated a new U.S.–Mexico–Canada Agreement (U.S.M.C.A.) to replace NAFTA. He accepted changes in his original agreement that were promoted by congressional Democrats, and therefore led Ohio’s Senator Sherrod Brown to comment that, “I never thought I’d be voting for a trade agreement during my Senate tenure that I wrote a big part of.”
President Biden inherited this rather mixed bag of a record, along with some serious uncertainty about how to proceed. In spite of the labor base, it’s hard for a Democratic presidency to follow President Trump’s policies in part because they were Trump’s policies and in part because the substance was not all that impressive. But the economic and political cases for continuing to try to expand trade by negotiating new deals is clearly weaker than it seemed to President Clinton or even Obama.
How, then, is President Biden addressing the trade issue? There is so much else going on that his responses have not received so much attention. Yet it is a fundamental question for economic policy. And rather complicated. Fortunately we have an extremely expert scholar of trade regulation on our faculty to talk about this. Professor Colares has litigated trade cases before federal agencies, courts, and trade panels. He joined the roster of NAFTA trade dispute panelists in 2013. Every year he organizes a Trade Law Fall Update conference, and he recently published a book on Restructuring Trade Agreements. Please join us as he shares perspectives on one of the most important issues for both economic and foreign policy.
Signing In
This semester’s discussions will begin at 12:30 p.m., the usual time. The meeting will be set up as from Noon to 2:00 p.m., so people are not all signing in at the same time and to allow for the discussion to run a bit long. Each week we will send out this newsletter with information about the topic. It will also include a link to register (for free) for the discussion. Every Monday the same information will be posted on our website: fridaylunch.case.edu.
If you register, you will automatically receive from the Zoom system the link to join the meeting. This week’s link for registration is:
https://cwru.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUudOuqpzIjG918Uq3Etd4ppsOArs48Xkz4
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
Please e-mail padg@case.edu if you have questions about how the Zoom version of the Friday Lunch will work or any other suggestions. Or call at 216 368-2426 and we’ll try to get back to you. We are very pleased to be partnering this semester with the Siegal Lifelong Learning Program to share information about the discussions.
Best wishes for safety and security for you and yours,
Joe White
Luxenberg Family Professor of Public Policy and Director, Center for Policy Studies
About Our Guest
Before joining the CWRU faculty, Juscelino Colares, clerked for the Hon. Jean-Louis Debré, chief justice of France’s Constitutional Court (2008-09 term) and practiced at Dewey Ballantine, LLP in Washington, D.C., where he litigated trade cases before federal agencies, federal courts, and NAFTA panels. Colares has served as chair of the University Faculty Senate and associate dean for Global Legal Studies.
A native of Brazil and naturalized citizen of the United States, Colares has been appointed by the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) to serve on the U.S. Roster of North American Free Trade Agreement (Chapter Nineteen) Panelists since 2013. This spring, USTR appointed him to the first U.S. Roster of United States-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement Panelists. For the last six years, Colares has organized a series of Trade Law Fall Updates, a practitioner-oriented gathering of leading trade lawyers, federal judges, and trade agency officials that has attracted much visibility to CWRU Law, as well as opportunities for his students and recent graduates. Besides trade law, Colares teaches civil procedure, conflict of laws, and a variety of courses on business and regulatory law.
Winner of the 2018 Faculty Research Award, Colares is the author of more than 35 articles and book chapters, and, more recently, the book, titled Restructuring Trade Agreements (Wolters Kluwer 2021). His work has appeared in leading peer-review journals and law reviews, including the American Law and Economics Review, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Journal of International Economic Law, Journal of World Trade, Jurimetrics, Columbia Journal of European Law, Cornell International Law Journal; Georgetown Journal of International Law; and Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law. |
