A Trade Strategy for the Post-Neoliberal World
The era of trickle-down, laissez-faire, free trade is over. It lasted roughly from President Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 to President Donald Trump’s election in 2016, reaching its peak in the early 2000s with China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). But since then, the United States and its partners—as well as economists and trade policy officials—have struggled to articulate a strategy to define and shape the next era of global trade. This is not altogether unexpected. The challenge is significant. In a hypercompetitive landscape, policymakers must shape the contours of global commerce to appropriately address the negative impacts of unfettered, liberalized trade, while maintaining its benefits. And they must do so in a world defined by interconnectivity and shaped by global challenges that cannot be solved without coordinated action with partners around the world.
1. Trade policy should be defined by the simple idea that ambitious standards—including those for workers’ rights, climate action, respect for the rule of law, and a commitment to joint actions to counter the nonmarket practices of others—should be a precondition for preferential access to the U.S. consumer market.
2. Tariff rates should be increasingly based on firm-level decisions, allowing individual exporters to receive better rates based on how well they treat their workers, recognize the collective bargaining rights of their employees, protect the environment, and decarbonize their production.
3. Trade policy should be closely aligned with a national investment strategy, ideally coordinated with like-minded partners, to ensure that domestic manufacturers—and their workers—remain at the forefront of the industries that will define the future, creating constituencies of workers and companies that benefit from trade rules that incentivize “race-to-the-top” behaviors.
Each of the pillars would be considered a heretical departure from the neoliberal underpinnings of the past 40 years. Taken together, they represent a bold vision for trade policy in a post-neoliberal world— one that is both values-based and, at the same time, broadly pragmatic, aimed at addressing the modern challenges of the 21st century. The strategy is centered on the need to make workers everywhere more prosperous, the world more equal, and the climate more sustainable. It is also built on a foundation of actions already taken by the Biden-Harris administration, albeit actions that should be pursued further and with greater strategic alignment than perhaps when originally considered.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/a-trade-strategy-for-the-post-neoliberal-world/