Law (or the rule of law) is essential in modern democracies. However, recent breakthroughs might require rearrangements...
Wednesday, February 23, 2022
How to attain academic novelty in a legal article?
Monday, February 14, 2022
The deep continuity in US Trade Policy between administrations (Obama, Trump, Biden)
In May 2021, I presented to a teleconference held in Le Havre, France, a paper underlining the deep continuities between Democrat and Republican US administrations in trade policies.
The article appeared as "Continuity and Change in US Trade Policy Towards China and Beyond" in a collective volume of Amandine CAYOL, Hye-Hwal SEONG, Remus TITIRIGA, Pierre CHABAL (eds.) Eurasian challenges to international economic law after BREXIT and in the context of the COVID-19, Peter Lang, Brussels, visible also at https://ssrn.com/abstract=4023085
The purpose of the paper was to determine whether the disruptive trade actions of the Trump administration concerning Eurasia and China would be pursued by the Biden administration.
Trump administration followed within a crescendo the antidumping and countervailing duties favoured already in the last years by President Obama.
The Trump administration also took a bolder stance in using different US legal instruments (out of WTO but not forbidden by WTO) to adopt trade sanctions against China and other countries. However, according to expert commenters, a Hillary Presidency would have also used such mechanisms, albeit under different rhetoric.
There was also a continuity in the escalation of US actions inside the WTO from Obama to Trump, who finally blocked the Appellate Body dispute settlement.
Given such deep continuities, I considered that the trade war with tariffs and sanctions on China adopted by the Trump administration will remain in place for the time being under the Biden administration.