U.S. political leadership is focused on competitiveness but may be oversimplifying requirements for its achievement. Most specifically, the political system itself. The institutional framework is such that the most powerful special interests become favored. Public spending on education has been rising but there are a dozen countries with a higher share of the population holding college degrees and yet all rank lower in competitiveness. The measure of competitiveness used by IMD in Switzerland involves 334 criteria and not just GDP and productivity. A large negative for the U.S. is public finance where an exploding budget deficit has tripled in the past four years as a predicted drag on competitiveness. ...
Key Market Insights The broad market is locked in on this week’s Trump-Xi meeting in Beijing, but this is no longer just a trade summit. Increasingly, the meeting is becoming tied directly to Iran, energy security, and the growing global economic fallout from disruptions through the Strai...
From WPI Consulting
Communicating importance of value-added products
Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.