Trade Wars

The World Trade Organization is up with a map of trade disputes among its members:



Blue lines represent complaints about other countries, red lines represent complaints from other countries; green countries aren't involved in any disputes. You can click on countries to get numbers of disputes and details on individual cases - quite handy.

Back around the time that various liberals, indigenous peoples, anarchists, labor unions, and environmentalists were staging massive and unprecedented protests against this obscure group of bureacrats known as the WTO back in 1999 and 2000 in places like Seattle, I became interested in the organization, the issue of trade liberalization, and the motives of the people who were running the WTO. To make a very, very long story short, it seemed as if the WTO existed mainly to enforce the prerogatives of multinational corporations around the world, particularly in developing countries, by exerting dangerously powerful mandate through extremely opaque mechanisms. Transparency, as much as anything, is the cornerstone of democracy, and it was sorely lacking in the WTO at the time.

Of course like most nefarious schemes, the WTO probably wasn't so much a cabal of greedy evil-doers as a collection of individuals, swayed by the power of money to some degree that they didn't understand themselves, but not with generally bad intentions - indeed, with a likely sincere faith in the ability of free markets to raise the standards of living for people around the world. Which is not to say that the structure of the WTO wasn't essentially anti-democratic, nor that it sufficiently accommodated the interests of people who would be negatively affected by some of its decisions; those were problems for the organization, and as far as I know they continue to be, though I haven't really kept up with the issue in recent years (and the specter of a sort of corporatist black-helicopter supra-national hobgoblin of the left seems to have waned since the failure of the Doha round of trade talks). At any rate, this map certainly represents a more transparent WTO than existed back at the turn of the century, and hopefully it's been evolving in that direction.

Also, one thing you'll note about the map is that the vast majority of trade disputes involve the major rich trading powers, especially the US and EU. Most countries in Africa, for instance, aren't involved in any trade disputes at all.

Via Resource Shelf.

Balances of Trade Since 1980

Whilst perusing the interwebs on HPI-related matters, I came across this Wikipedia map of cumulative current account balances from 1980 to 2008, based on IMF data:



This map indicates, more or less, the trade surplus or deficit for countries since 1980, in billions of dollars.

According to this, the top five net exporters since 1980 have been

1. Japan: 2,747.943 billion dollars US
2. China: 1,521.887
3. Germany: 1,047.328
4. Russia: 613.978
5. Switzerland: 596.977

The top five net importers have been

1. United States: -7,335.869
2. Spain: -773.443
3. United Kingdom: -695.155
4. Australia: -529.031
5. Mexico: -263.667

For 2007, the top twenty country net exporters included 6 European countries, 6 East Asian countries, and 8 members of OPEC. The top 16 net importers included 11 European countries (including Turkey) and 6 countries with a history of British colonization. But note that Ireland gets counted twice.

Singapore's Straits

Via Passport, a Foreign Policy blog, a Google Earth map showing the pile-up of cargo ships bobbing idly outside of Singapore.



It's a sign of the global economic times:

The world's busiest port for container traffic, Singapore saw its year-over-year volume drop by 19.6 percent in January 2009, followed by a 19.8 percent drop in February. As of mid-March 2009, 11.3 percent of the world's shipping capacity, sat idle, a record.

It's obviously a bad time to be a tiny city-state with few natural resources that's pretty much entirely dependent on trade for economic well-being:

The IMF projects that Singapore's economy will shrink significantly in 2009. Globally, bulk shipping rates have dropped more than 80 percent in the past year on weak demand, and orders for new shipping vessels are cratering. In Busan, South Korea, the fifth-largest port in the world, empty shipping containers are piling up faster than officials can manage.

If you want to follow cargo ships around the world in a nifty Google Earth app, go to vesseltracker.com.

China and US Trade

Mint has a visualization of trade relations between the US and China, and between those countries and the world.



Some numbers from the graphic:

Total US Exports: $1.38 Trillion
Total Chinese Exports: $1.47 Trillion
Total US imports: $2.19 Trillion
Total Chinese imports: $1.16 Trillion
Total US Exports to China: $71.4 Billion
Total Chinese Exports to the US: $337.8 Billion
Top destination for US exports: Canada ($261.4 Billion)
Top destination for Chinese exports: US; EU is next ($300.5 Billion)
Top source of US imports: China; Canada is next ($335.6 Billion)
Top source of Chinese imports: Japan ($152.1 Billion)