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With the trade war between the United States and China heating up, we thought it would be a good time to revisit AEI’s decades-long focus on international trade. One of the Institute’s first resident scholars was the noted economist Gottfried Haberler. Haberler joined AEI in the early 1970s, long after he had written a seminal work, A Theory of International Trade, (1936). Thinking about trade occupied him for much of his career. While at AEI, he researched such topics as the causes and cures of inflation, international monetary reform, exchange rate flexibility, and the problem of stagflation among many other topics.
Carrying on this rich tradition in trade policy research, AEI welcomed Claude Barfield to the Economics Policy team in 1983. For the last 35 years, Barfield has been writing extensively about trade and possible pitfalls in international policy. Within four years of joining AEI, Barfield, in collaboration with the renowned AEI economist, John H. Makin, co-edited a collection of essays from leading economists, trade policy experts, and legislators. The finished volume, “Trade Policy and US Competitiveness,” was groundbreaking at the time for its scope and depth of research.
In 1996, Dartmouth professor Douglas Irwin wrote a popular AEI Press monograph called “Three Simple Principles of Trade Policy.” In it, Irwin claims the three principles of trade policy are:
Irwin also wrote “Against the Tide” which explains how free trade has endured against the tide of criticisms from the days of Adam Smith to the present. Also of note, the editor of this blog, James Pethokoukis, sat with Douglas Irwin last Summer for a Q&A on free trade. It’s a great piece and worth a read.
Building on the history of trade research at AEI, Derek Scissors brings a new dimension with his in-depth knowledge of China’s economy. Scissors and his team track Chinese investments in the United States using the China Tracker. This one-of-a-kind tool includes 3100 large transactions across energy, transportation, real estate, and other industries made by Chinese parent companies.
Additionally, Barfield and Scissors have been providing insightful commentary on the Trump administration’s trade policy and especially on the escalating fight between China and the United States. In a recent interview about the latest developments, Barfield argued that China overplayed its hand, moving the goalposts throughout the negotiations and betting that President Trump needed an agreement. But, as it turned out, he said, the US “wouldn’t swallow any deal.” In a recent AEIdeas post, Scissors argued that we need to fix America’s China policies and discussed the defects in the administration’s strategy.
With the trade war between the United States and China heating up this week, we thought it would be a good time to revisit AEI’s decades-long focus on international trade.
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