Alex Singleton

A welcome entrant to the blogosphere comes from the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation - the Private Sector Development Blog. Its aim is to talk about market approaches to development thinking, gathering together news, resources and ideas about the role of private enterprise in fighting poverty.

Jonathan Dingel, one of my favourite bloggers, is rather less optimistic than me about the merits of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Bilateral trade agreements are messy, discriminatory, and are open to pressure from corporate vested interests. I’d be delighted if the US would unilaterally abandon all of its trade barriers - and […]

The current issue of Foreign Affairs has an excellent article debunking the idea that America’s antidumping policies are good for America. The essay, Antidumping: The Third Rail of Trade Policy, is written by N. Gregory Mankiw and Phillip L. Swagel. They say that antidumping law has become just a way for vested interests to protect […]

What was James Howard Kunstler thinking of when he wrote an op-ed in The Guardian last week? His article, ‘Globalisation is an anomaly and its time is running out‘, says that:
Today’s transient global economic relations are a product of very special transient circumstances, namely relative world peace and absolutely reliable supplies of cheap energy. Subtract […]

Published in The Business newpaper:
It has been a great few days for supporters of global free trade, despite the best efforts of reactionary forces in the United States, Britain and Brussels. The Central American Free Trade Agreement, which extends open markets to six nations plus the US, passed in the House of Representatives, defeating the […]

Madsen Pirie, president of the Adam Smith Institute, the free-market think tank, has an interesting couple of blogs on the environment and energy. In Move over Kyoto, he discusses America’s alternative approach to Kyoto:
Thanks to a US-led initiative, there is now a valid alternative to the expensive and anti-growth policies enshrined in the Kyoto Protocol. […]

Britain’s Sun newspaper had an superb article on Friday on the effect of globalisation on China. Oliver Harvey, writing from Shenzhen in China, pointed out that only 25 years ago Shenzhen was a…
…sleepy, impoverished, fishing village. Workers in blue Mao tunics cycled to work for a pittance in the bleak paddy fields on Communist farms.Today, […]