Trade Policy Developments President Trump has obliquely renewed his threat to initiate a trade war against Europe if the two sides do not arrive at a satisfactory new trade agreement. His budget increased funding for USTR by 11.1 percent to better enable the agency’s war fighting capability. However, one area of possible transatlantic agreement is special and differential treatment. The Trump Administration has revised the thresholds for subsidy calculations in countervailing duty cases so that countries self-declared as poor and developing but deemed by the U.S. to be rich and developed will be judged on the higher standard. Frustrated by the inability to reach international agreement on fisheries subsidies, the EU now says that cou...
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.