作者：Chad Bown 来源：foreignaffairs.com
How to Stop Protectionism From Running Amok
For three years, the administration of U.S. President
Donald Trump has attacked the global trading system. Now other forces are
battering international trade. The pandemic spread of COVID-19, the disease
caused by the novel coronavirus, is stoking new pressure for protectionism, and
the World
Trade Organization (WTO) needs to prepare for more countries to
capitulate under the strain.
If the trend is left unchecked, the world may repeat the
experience of the 1930s, when industrial production fell by nearly 40 percent,
unemployment soared, and economic activity remained anemic for the better part
of a decade. Then as now, trade barriers did not cause the problems. America’s
Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act did not trigger the Great Depression,
and tariffs today will not have caused the COVID-19 depression. But such
barriers could affect the recovery, especially given the modern importance of
cross-border supply chains. What happens now will influence the shape the
trading system will take for decades to come.
THE TARIFFS ARE
COMING
No one should be surprised if the Trump administration uses
the current situation as a pretext for imposing new trade barriers. Trump has
shown that he is happy to apply vast trade restrictions in good economic times,
even over the objections of American business. Tariffs on tens of billions of
dollars of steel and aluminum are still in place. The administration reached a
temporary truce with China in February, but most of the trade
war tariffs remain, still affecting more than half of two-way
trade. Now come the bad economic times—and a presidential election. Trump will
need someone to blame for the mass unemployment and bankruptcies that COVID-19
is leaving in its wake. If and when he picks foreigners as that scapegoat, his
natural next step will be further protectionism.
Other countries have shown remarkable restraint during
Trump’s first three years in office, in that they have not escalated matters
with disproportionate protectionism of their own. Perhaps their leaders were
waiting for Trump’s tenure to end, hoping to keep the rules-based trading
system going as long as necessary for the United States—the system’s architect
and leading member—to return to its historical role. With the exception of
China, countries largely kept their responses to Trump’s aggression in line
with the WTO’s fraying rulebook. They also mostly acted in solidarity and
refrained from lashing out at one another. The European Union even took the
opportunity to pen new
trade deals with Canada, Japan, Brazil, and Argentina,
portraying itself as a champion of multilateralism and international
cooperation.
The pandemic, however, has strained that solidarity. Trade
barriers within Europe have sprung up remarkably quickly. In March, France and
Germany banned
sales of vital hospital equipment outside of national borders,
including to virus-ravaged Italy. The European Commission had to step in with a
compromise: member states could limit exports of medical supplies to everyone
else, so long as they played nice with one another. With that arrangement,
Brussels salvaged internal harmony—at the cost of the moral authority on
multilateralism that Europe had worked so hard to maintain during the age of
Trump.
Export protectionism is contagious: the United Kingdom, South
Korea, Brazil, India, Turkey, Russia, and dozens of other countries have restricted
foreign sales of medical supplies, pharmaceuticals, and even
food. But nativist economic practices carry risks, the most serious of which
may play out not during the pandemic but after it, when industrial production
restarts.
Much of Europe’s manufacturing sector rightly shut down
to help limit the public health effects from the coronavirus. But the
asynchronous timing of the global pandemic may mean that countries outside of
Europe reopen their economies earlier than Europe does. When hundreds of
billions of euros in shoes, electronics, chemicals, and other low-priced goods
suddenly show up at ports in Rotterdam and Hamburg, European industry will
surely kick up a fuss, demanding tariff protection from the onslaught of unfair
trade. Moreover, China might try to get its depressed economy going again by
subsidizing manufacturing in the manner that led Europe, the United States, and
others to complain of unfair trading practices in the first place. Since
Chinese products will remain mostly walled off from the United States owing to
the trade war, Brussels will be an important bellwether.
But governments outside of Europe will also come under
pressure to protect domestic industries, and European exporters will face the
brunt of such measures in foreign markets. Companies everywhere can and will
seek relief from imports by asking their governments to hit foreign competitors
with many forms of tariffs. The WTO’s conditions for
levying tariffs are pretty accommodating. An industry needs to show that it has
been injured—not a difficult bar to clear given current economic hardships.
After that, a common argument industries will make is that foreigners should be
punished for doing something unfair.
One tariff catch phrase that will soon creep into public
discourse is “countervailing duty.” The term describes an anti-subsidy tariff
that is used to discourage unfair competition arising from state intervention
in markets. Governments are currently allocating trillions
of dollars to keep companies afloat. In the aftermath of
COVID-19, lots of imports will arrive on foreign shores from companies that got
bailouts. Under WTO rules, it matters little if the domestic industry got a
handout, too, or if the foreign subsidy was sensible economic policy at the
time. The rules allow for both sides to subsidize and both sides to reciprocate
with anti-subsidy tariffs, as inefficient an outcome as that may seem.
In fact, while problematic, that scenario would be far from
the worst case. Some governments may ignore WTO rules altogether, mimic Trump’s
actions on steel and aluminum, and claim that imports need to be stopped
because the trade poses a threat to their national security. Or they may
justify tariffs as a necessary response to the public health emergency, as
Brussels effectively did with its export controls on medical supplies.
THIS TIME IS
DIFFERENT
Only a coordinated political commitment among global leaders
will prevent an onslaught of protectionism in these extraordinary times. The
WTO rules actually make such protectionism likely in the absence of an upfront
plan to stop it. But no such global policy commitment has materialized. We know
this, because we know what action against tariffs during a global economic
crisis looks like.
The financial crisis of 2008 also produced an economic
collapse sharp and deep enough to threaten the modern trading system. Ever
since the devastation of the 1930s, the fear has been that economic hardship
would cause trade barriers to rocket out of control. Yet the last global
recession turned out to produce a shockingly low level of protection. Trade
barriers did not shoot up, in part because of the domestic policy
response of the U.S. and other governments: large government spending programs,
central bank interventions, and flexible exchange rates that ensured that the
dollar and euro especially did not remain excessively strong. These policies
were significantly different from those that greeted the Great Depression.
Protectionism was also limited because leaders of the
major economies got out ahead of the problem. In November 2008, despite not yet
knowing the full severity of the economic crisis, the George W. Bush
administration brought together leaders of 20 industrialized and major emerging
economies in a new G-20, where the attendees made an important
pledge: “We underscore the critical importance of rejecting
protectionism and not turning inward in times of financial uncertainty. In this
regard, within the next 12 months, we will refrain from raising new barriers to
investment or to trade in goods and services, imposing new export restrictions,
or implementing World Trade Organization (WTO) inconsistent measures to
stimulate exports.”
The timing of the 2008 crisis was hardly ideal. Lehman
Brothers collapsed, the U.S. financial and automobile sectors needed bailouts,
and millions of Americans suddenly found themselves out of work. To make
matters worse, the U.S. government was in the midst of a transition: the Bush
administration was about to turn out the lights after eight years in office,
and Barack Obama would not begin until January 20, 2009.
The Bush administration was both a lame duck and deeply
unpopular abroad. The international reputation of the United States was still
reeling from the Iraq war. Tensions had escalated with China due to its
undervalued exchange rate. Even trade was not going well, as the Doha
Round of WTO negotiations had collapsed into acrimony in July.
To its credit, the U.S. administration overcame all those obstacles to put
together a Washington summit that ultimately helped the trading system survive.
Admittedly, the global disharmony that the Bush
administration overcame in 2008 pales in comparison with the bitterness and
distrust today.
A LOW STARTING
POINT
Thus far, Trump has followed his usual playbook in his trade
response to COVID-19. U.S. hospitals faced dire shortages of personal
protective equipment. Still, the administration waited until March 17 to
grudgingly remove trade war tariffs on respirators and surgical masks from
China, where nearly 75 percent of U.S. mask imports are produced. Ten days
later, Trump appointed Peter
Navarro, a top trade adviser, China hawk, and leading proponent of
tariffs, to direct COVID-19 supply chain and trade policy. The administration
then almost immediately invoked the Defense Production Act and mimicked
Brussels’s beggar-thy-neighbor policy by limiting American exports of
respirators and masks, too.
On March 30, the G-20 trade ministers had a virtual meeting.
They made little mention of the coming protectionist pressure or what to do
about it. To the contrary, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, a trade
skeptic, took the opportunity to
blame the COVID-19 crisis on trade itself: “Unfortunately, like
others, we are learning in this crisis that over-dependence on other countries
as a source of cheap medical products and supplies has created a strategic
vulnerability to our economy.”
The joint statement coming out of the G-20 meeting was “not
as ambitious” as he had wanted, EU Trade Commissioner Phil Hogan confessed. But
France and Germany were partly to blame for having left a mess for Brussels to
clean up. Instead of countering the calls for protection, Hogan had to explain
why the EU’s own protectionist export controls on medical supplies weren’t as
bad as they looked.
WHO WILL STEP UP?
Even if Trump had never come along, COVID-19 would have put
the trading system to a stiff test. But Trump has left the WTO less prepared
than it might have been. Unlike in 2008, this time there is little hope that
immediate leadership will come out of Washington.
Saving the rules-based trading system from a crisis of
widespread protectionism will require creativity and foresight from somewhere
else. Squint hard enough and some hopeful signs are visible. Trump torpedoed the
WTO’s system of resolving trade disputes in late 2019—in response, the European
Union organized a workaround, signing up a number of major economies outside of
the United States to a framework to resolve their differences harmoniously. And
a group of smaller economies—led by Canada and Australia—has put forward an
antiprotectionist trade statement on COVID-19 that is more aggressive than any
the G-20 could agree on.
Governments of the major economies must do more, and
quickly. They should not let Washington’s current dysfunction hold them back.
At a minimum, countries will need to channel potentially unstoppable demands
for protection into the WTO system’s most transparent, time-limited, and least
distorting instruments. A special tariff called a “safeguard” satisfies
those criteria and may be the best option. Safeguards are for emergencies, when
imports surge and threaten to further damage industry, and they do not require
assigning blame to foreigners. Applying one will not tangle policymakers in
esoteric arguments over which subsidies granted in response to COVID-19 are
“unfair”—a topic unworthy of litigation during a pandemic in which nearly
everyone is treating state aid like Monopoly money.
The failure to anticipate and prepare for the coming
demand for trade protection could be catastrophic. Starting the trading system
over from scratch would be not only extremely difficult but incredibly costly,
as there would surely be an interim in which no system functioned at all. But
as with containing the pandemic, shoring up trade cannot be any one nation’s
sole endeavor. Until the pandemic is contained everywhere, it is a worry
anywhere. The same is true for protectionism.
来源时间：2020/4/29 发布时间：2020/4/28
旧文章ID：21522
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