September 28, 2016
The establishment types are pulling out all the stops in trying to resuscitate the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Hence we get a report from the OECD on the declining growth rate of world trade and a front page article highlighting the report in the Washington Post.
I haven’t read the report carefully, but it is worth making two quick points. First, trade has grown rapidly as share of world GDP from 1970 to the 2008 crash. (Interestingly, the world economy was growing more rapidly in the 1960s when there was little increase in the ratio of trade to GDP.) It was virtually inevitable that the rate of growth of trade would slow. Once the volume of trade is very large relative to the economy, it is hard for it to grow too much further.
In other words, once we have removed all the barriers in trade between the U.S. and Canada, we will have seen most of the expected growth in trade and in subsequent years we would expect trade to grow pretty much at the same pace as the economy. If we want to see more trade, then make the economies grow faster, say with larger budget deficits providing stimulus.
The other point is that many economists have argued that GDP growth is being substantially understated due to measurement error. The basic story is that we are getting lots of items free over the Internet that we used to pay for. These free items are not counted in GDP even though the costly ones they replace would have been.
I am a skeptic on this one. Clearly there is some truth to the story, but I doubt it amounts to more than 0.1 percentage point of GDP growth and almost certainly not more than 0.2 percentage points. Nonetheless, the argument is taken seriously by many. Jan Hatzius, the chief economist at Goldman Sachs, argues that the understatement could be as much as 0.75 percentage points.
Whatever the true story, the measurement error occurs overwhelmingly in items likely to be subject to international trade (e.g. music and videos transferred over the web.) This means that however much we are understating GDP growth due to measurement error of this sort, we are likely understating trade growth by close to twice this amount. That could help to explain a substantial portion of the reported slowing of trade growth.
It is also worth noting that stronger and longer patent and copyright protection (as required in trade deals like the TPP), which can be equivalent to tariffs of several thousand percent on the protected items, would be expected to slow both overall economic growth and the volume of international trade.
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