Instructor:
Thomas Ruddy, email:
thomas@thomasruddy.org- March 24th, 2003: Toward a European Strategy for Iraq (Policy Paper by Felix Neugart from the Centre for Applied Political Research (CAP), Munich, Germany, and Dr. Giacomo Luciani, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute, Florence, Italy (in Adobe's PDF format, 169 kB)
- March 29th, 2003: The Curse of Mercantilism, Der Fluch des Merkantilismus (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, in German)
- Two debates related to these issues are running online that include analyses by authors knowledgeable in the finance domain and international institutions: Iraq - the war & after and American power & the world
- May 2002: Two former International Management students Franc Kaiser and Philipp Von Büren published their report "China and the WTO: Business opportunities for Swiss companies" (3.1 MB in PDF format)
- Sept. 19, 2002: Business laws to be in line with WTO rules
- Sept. 20, 2002: Action on piracy to spur climate for foreign investors
- Sept. 23, 2002: European Union (EU) will meet for three days with heads of state of 10 Asian countries for the biennial ASEM (Asia-Europe Meeting)
- Sept. 28, 2002: Pepsi Seeks 'Divorce' in China: Subsidiary Seeks to Dissolve Partnership That Runs Bottling Plant in Sichuan Province. "The latest cautionary tale of the pitfalls of investing here as an unprecedented amount of capital pours in after China's admission to the World Trade Organization."
- September 2002: Is Globalization Good for the Poor in China? In: Finance and Development, a quarterly magazine of the IMF, Volume 39, Number 3.
- Oct. 7, 2002: WTO Director-General says that disappointing trade figures underscore importance of accelerating trade talks. Positive sign: China became the world's fourth-largest importer-exporter.
- Oct. 28, 2002: "...Now that China has entered the World Trade Organization, many fear that China’s state-owned companies... will collapse under the pressure of foreign competition," from "Reform: Zhu Rongji's Promise" section of the current Newsweek Series "The New Faces of China".
- November 4-6, 2002: Conference on the WTO and China, International Seamen’s Club, Guangzhou, China
- Nov. 5, 2002: "The world's largest Free Trade Area FTA" proposed, as Asian trade pacts proliferate.(Trade Alert)
- Nov. 6, 2002: Foreign companies praise China's WTO reforms but want more (Reuters).
- November 2002: First issue of FHSO's "Shanghai Report" published by former International Management student turned research assistant Franc Kaiser
- Nov. 21, 2002: EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy holds Internet chat about the "New WTO Trade Round: Talking Trade - What's going on?" A few excerpts from the two-hour-long official transcript that are relevant to our course:
- "[Thu Nov 21 19:02:12 2002] [Lamy_5] [1057] 1019, to ilha, on China: the main impact of Chinese accession is on China: no aspect of the Chinese way of life will go entirely unchanged. WTO membership is a major strateguc challenge and opportunity which China is grasping. Implementation is still in the first year: and nobody is perfect, but China is making a genuine effort to comply ..."
- "[Thu Nov 21 19:21:10 2002] [Lamy_5] [1280] 1227, to YBG2, on China: all WTO members will find it easier to deal with China, whatever the disparity in size, now that China has joined us all in WTO. For the rest, China`s future growth and opening will provide oppotunities for developing country traders."
Latin America in crisis
Last year we looked at the finance structure of IPE, taking as examples the tensions in emerging markets like Argentina, Brazil and Turkey, many of which are continuing this year. We considered the risk of further complicating the unstable, global economic climate as we entered a recession with an emerging-market financial crisis like the famous one in 1997/98; on that event we have a newly acquired video entitled "The Crash" to enrich the lectures. (For each of the following links a new window will open in your browser.)
- Argentina's Economic Crisis (Yahoo "Full Coverage")
- March - August 24, 2001: Argentina's Economic Crisis (Financial Times)
- Why is this book the No. 1 bestseller on Amazon Latin America? Michael Pettis: The Volatility Machine. Read the introduction or a chapter by this author as PDF files.
- October 24 2001: Argentina's economy minister, Domingo Cavallo, travels to New York over debt scheme (Financial Times)
- October 29 2001: Default fears hit Argentine markets (Financial Times)
- Forum: What next for Argentina? (Financial Times)
- "Historians and economists will spend the next decade arguing about the causes of the Argentine crisis," predicts Ricardo Hausmann, former chief economist of the Inter-American Development Bank, and proposes a strategy "similar to that followed by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 when he took the dollar off the gold standard."(Financial Times)
- September 17, 2001: World Bank/IMF Annual Meetings on Threat of Global Recession Postponed due to Terrrorist Attacks in NY and Washington DC (BBC)
- October 10, 2001: Nobel Prize Awarded to Joseph Stiglitz for Model Describing Financial Crises (Corporate Watch)
- October 18, 2001: Stiglitz' theory explained (Zeit, in German)
- Joseph Stiglitz: "The openness of a country to foreign trade seems to have a far greater effect on its economic success than would be predicted by the standard trade models of comparative advantage. One explanation is knowledge: trade and foreign direct investment provide important channels for the transmission of knowledge," Public Policy for a Knowledge Economy, 1999.
- January 21, 2002: Enron implosion and Argentina collapse: Debacles of globalization by Dr. Walden Bello, executive director of the NGO Focus on the Global South
- September 29, 2002: IMF Advances 'Sovereign Bankruptcy' Concept
- September 30, 2002: Analysis: IMF, World Bank Short on Global Solutions
- October 21, 2002: Brazil’s New Global Fears One editor's opinion on the benefits of free trade in reducing poverty
- November 2002 issue: Saving Latin America: One editor's opinion on why George W. Bush should use a U.S.-Brazil trade deal and why Jos. Stiglitz is so popular there ( Foreign Policy)
- Further reading on globalization from Thomas Ruddy's online bibliography
- September 2002: The United Nations Commissioner of Human Rights, Mary Robinson, has issued a paper on the WTO agreement on Trade in Services GATS and human rights.
- November 26, 2002 (and online): The Prime Minister of Belgium invites concerned citizens to a continuation of his globalization debate.
- December 14-15, 2002: Student conference on EU Governance in Constance, Germany.
- January 22, 2003: "France and Ireland yesterday dealt a potentially serious blow to the Doha world trade round [with their opposition to]... liberalisation of global farm trade." writes the Financial Times.
Trade news from external sources
(A new window will open in your browser.)- Global Trade Negotiations Home Page from Harvard University, by a team under Dr. Dani Rodrik (who co-organized a conference in Berlin in 2002" on "Globalization and Democracy" with the Frd.-Ebert Foundation). At this Governance Portal in Berlin is the continuation of that tradition.
- WTO Watch
- Yahoo coverage of WTO and International Trade
- International Trade Centre UNCTAD/WTO, Geneva
- Alternative Economics news
Official course description, 2002, in PDF format
Presentation describing course, 2000, in PDF format
Class slides in PDF format (You must have the free Adobe Acrobat Reader available from Adobe to view these files.) Classes will meet on the days shown below under "Class meetings and required readings".
- Preview of first 3 class meetings (updated 24th Jan. 2001)
- Comparative Advantage/Protectionism <----THIS SESSION IS STILL AVAILABLE (added 1st Feb. 2001)
- International Trade WTO, Part 1 of 2 (added 11th Feb. 2001)
- International Trade WTO, Part 2 of 2: A New Trade Round and New Topics (added 12th Feb. 2001)
- Europe as a Regional Trading Bloc (added 18th Feb. 2001)
- Trade in Services, Telecommunications and the Internet Economy (added 22nd Feb. 2001)
- Division of Labor on International Communications Regimes (added 29th Nov. 2001)
Class meetings and required readings in HTML format
(updated Jan. 15, 2003)
Weblinks in HTML format (updated April 5, 2003)
The URL of this page is http://www.hsw.fhso.ch/ruddy/ on one of the servers of the University of Applied Sciences in Olten, Canton Solothurn, Northwestern Switzerland, http://www.fhso.ch. Disclaimer: any views expressed on these Webpages do not necessarily reflect those of the institution at which I am employed.
Updated April 5, 2003