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Trade in sentence

11085 examples of Trade in a sentence

Some will see globalization as the cause of this hardship, for if the poor were not linked to the rich through trade, they would not be affected by the recession.
For example, the US is far and away Ecuador’s largest trading partner, accounting for more than a third of its foreign trade.
Given warnings from US companies about the impact of a stronger dollar on their earnings – not to mention signs of declining inward tourism and a deteriorating trade balance – this is not guaranteed.
Indeed, America's intricate trade relations with the rest of the world – which place households and companies on both sides of the production and consumption equation – make it particularly difficult to stimulate significant political support for protectionism there.
Don’t Cry Over Dead Trade AgreementsCAMBRIDGE – The seven decades since the end of World War II were an era of trade agreements.
The world’s major economies were in a perpetual state of trade negotiations, concluding two major global multilateral deals: the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the treaty establishing the World Trade Organization.
In addition, more than 500 bilateral and regional trade agreements were signed – the vast majority of them since the WTO replaced the GATT in 1995.
While developing countries may pursue smaller trade agreements, the two major deals on the table, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), are as good as dead after the election of Donald Trump as US president.
What purpose do trade agreements really serve?
The answer would seem obvious: countries negotiate trade agreements to achieve freer trade.
It’s not just that today’s trade agreements extend to many other policy areas, such as health and safety regulations, patents and copyrights, capital-account regulations, and investor rights.
It’s also unclear whether they really have much to do with free trade.
The standard economic case for trade is a domestic one.
There will be winners and losers, but trade liberalization enlarges the size of the economic pie at home.
So open trade requires no cosmopolitanism; it just needs the necessary domestic adjustments to ensure that all (or at least politically powerful) groups can partake in the overall benefits.
They have no need for trade agreements, because free trade is in their best interest to begin with (and they have no bargaining leverage over larger countries).
Economists see a case for trade agreements for large countries because these countries can manipulate their terms of trade – the world prices of the goods they export and import.
A trade agreement that prohibits such beggar-thy-neighbor policies can be useful to all countries, because, in its absence, they could all end up collectively worse off.
But it is difficult to square this rationale with what happens under actual trade agreements.
So economics doesn’t take us too far in understanding trade agreements.
Politics seems a more promising avenue: US trade policies in steel and aircraft are probably better explained by policymakers’ desire to help those specific industries – both of which have a powerful lobbying presence in Washington, DC – than by their overall economic consequences.
If trade policies are largely shaped by political lobbying, wouldn’t international trade negotiations similarly be at the mercy of those same lobbies?
And can trade rules written by a combination of domestic and foreign lobbies, rather than by domestic lobbies alone, guarantee a better outcome?
When trade agreements were largely about import tariffs, negotiated exchange of market access generally produced lower import barriers – an example of the benefits of lobbies acting as counterweights to one another.
Newer trade agreements incorporate rules on “intellectual property,” capital flows, and investment protections that are mainly designed to generate and preserve profits for financial institutions and multinational enterprises at the expense of other legitimate policy goals.
International trade agreements can contribute only in limited ways to remedying such domestic political failures, and sometimes they aggravate those failures.
Let us keep this in mind as we bemoan the passing of the era of trade agreements.
If we manage our own economies well, new trade agreements will be largely redundant.
Moreover, given the deftness with which China has negotiated bilateral trade treaties with many Asian and African countries that favor its interests, the US approach could fail to ensure that Western interests prevail.
But even that spike was dwarfed by the increase in mentions and corresponding worries about the dollar starting in 2001, reflecting the shock of the terrorist attacks that September, the mushrooming growth of the US trade deficit, and then the global financial crisis of 2008.
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