Most of the fuss about international trade focuses on goods and services that cross international borders. But a number of major US multinational companies--GM, Ford, Starbucks, Nike, and others--have both production facilities and large sales in China. For example, GM sells more cars in China than in the United States. Overall, US exports of goods and services to China in 2016 were $170 billion; but total revenues of US multinationals producing and selling in China that year was twice as high at $345 billion.
If I want to try a different pizza joint, switching is easy. If I want to use a different social media platform, switching can be much harder. That's one reason why competition works better when buying pizza. How about if we required that social media companies make it straightforward to port our data and our digital identity to other providers? Joshua Gans discusses this idea in "Enhancing Competition with Data and Identity Portability" (Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution, Policy Proposal 2018-10, June 2018).
The beekeeping industry matters more to economists than those who are not buzzing around the fields of economics may suspect. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was common for economists to use bees as a theoretical example of a situation where markets would not work well. The underlying argument was that it would be hard for beekeepers and growers to agree on how to price pollination services. This argument bit the dust, hard, when a practically minded economist pointed out in the 1970s that in fact, such agreements between beekeepers and growers had been commonplace for decades. I offered a quick overview of this this intellectual history in "Do Markets Work for Bees?" (July 10, 2014)
Greece has exited bailout territory and the European Union is making a strong case of the success of the program.
I find it amusing to read some analysts stating that the Chinese government’s stealth yuan devaluation has offset the impact of tariffs.
There is a certain kind of environmentalist who seems unable to acknowledge any good news about the environment, because it might create complacency about remaining issues. I'm not a fan of this approach. When successes are denied, credibility diminishes. And if there's never been an environmental success to celebrate, I'm more likely to be discouraged about the future than energized. In that spirit, here are some figures from an Environment Protection Agency annual report, Our Nation's Air.
"Moral licensing" is a term from the behavioral psychology literature. Daniel Effron of the London Business School, who has done some of the research in this area, descrbes it this way: "[T]he ability to point to evidence of past virtue can ironically make people more willing to act less-than-virtuously." Or as the title of one article puts it "being good frees us to be bad."