Anne O. Krueger

WASHINGTON, DC – Late last month, US President Donald Trump threatened to impose tariffs on imports from Mexico in ten days if it did not halt the flow of migrants from Central America. The tariffs would start at 5% and then increase by five percentage points monthly until reaching 25% in October. The announcement came as a shock, especially given that the United States and Mexico (plus Canada) had reached an agreement on a revised North American Free Trade Agreement just months earlier, at Trump’s insistence. Ratification of the new trade deal, the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), is now in jeopardy

WASHINGTON, DC – Not content with its trade war against China, US President Donald Trump’s administration has also opened bilateral trade negotiations with Japan. Yet whatever Trump hopes to achieve with Japan, it will be far less than what he threw away when he abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in early 2017

WASHINGTON, DC – When you try something for 99 years and the situation keeps getting worse, it is time to try something else. The United States Congress passed the Merchant Marine Act of 1920 (also known as the Jones Act) in order to protect America’s shipping industry and strengthen national security. But the law has almost destroyed the industry, and imposed huge costs on America’s businesses, consumers, and the environment. It needs to be sunk

Washington, DC – US President Donald Trump’s “trade war” with China has been slogging along for more than a year now, and could escalate further if current talks do not lead to a deal

The world has witnessed many sharp economic declines over the years, but Venezuela’s is surely one of the worst to date. The country has experienced a loss of real (inflation-adjusted) GDP greater than that of most war-ravaged countries during World War II, and its inflation rate is expected to reach 10,000,000% this year. At well over 100 times the black-market rate, the official exchange rate depreciates so rapidly that a quote has lost its meaning by the time it is published

In the nineteenth century, more than 70% of American workers were farmers. By 2017, that figure was under 2%. In 1970, about 32% of private employment was in goods-producing industries. By 2018, that figure was 13.5%. The dynamic sectors of the American economy are in services, though US President Donald Trump, with his fixation on old manufacturing industries, doesn’t seem to have grasped that