Trade Policy Labor USTR’s annual National Trade Estimates Report is a good source of the barriers and problems confronted by U.S. exporters in other countries. Despite trade liberalization over the years, the document gets longer rather than shorter as more problems are identified. Moving an issue from identification to action is limited by the labor available to USTR and other trade agencies. Plus, the government’s foreign and national security policies have a way of trumping the trade policy complaints of American industry. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) correctly chastises the Biden Administration for failing to even nominate officials for vacant slots in the trade policy apparatus. Without adequate personnel, the list of t...
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.