Tim Worstall

The eurozone crisis certainly provides a convenient excuse but it doesn’t really explain why the UK’s export performance has been so poor relative to its continental competitors. The latest projections from the European Commission suggest that the UK’s export performance in 2012 will be one of the worst in the EU. A likely 0.2 per [...]

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Fun: I’ve just been asked if I can sell some “baleine oil”. I assume, given that the email came from a native French speaker, that they mean whale oil. Does anyone at all still use this stuff?

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Then your conclusions are obviously going to be wrong. In real terms, Americans are on average no better off than they were 30 years ago; That simply is not true. The way you get to a figure which seems to show that it is is by looking at median household income. And median household income [...]

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Free Trade held out a mutually convenient if idealized concordat: politics kept out of business, and business kept out of politics. Please complete the PJ O’Rourke quote: when legislators decide what can be bought and sold…..

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More globalisation! The Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr) forecasts that the value of seaborne UK imports, adjusted for inflation, will grow by 287pc over the next two decades, with exports delivered by sea up 119pc. Britain’s £345bn imports by sea in 2010 will rocket to £1.95tn by 2030, the Cebr estimates, with exports [...]

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The actual energy analysis is that bad. But the surrounding argument is nonsensical. The energy “war” is going to lead to global conflict like the Thirty Years’ War that devasted Germany. Umm, right. Never heard of trade then? Sigh. The Thirty Years’ War was, at heart (and whole libraries have been written about the causes [...]

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Quelle Surprise. Either the EU gets tough in its demands, by threatening to shut out firms from countries like China that remain closed – barring them from tendering for public contracts in Europe The aim and point of trade is not to make exports. It is to purchase imports. Those lovely things that Johnny Foreigner [...]

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Saying that everyone could be made better off with increased international trade is not the same as people actually being made better off. There are winners and losers from increased international trade, and while I agree that the gains exceed the losses in almost all cases, the gains haven’t been distributed in a way that [...]

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“I am bound to say that it is our interest to buy cheap, whether other countries will buy cheap or no.” Unfortunately, that was a long time ago.

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But on trade policy formulation, it seems that the right hand doesn’t always know what the left hand is doing. Last year, while magnesium imports from China were subject to U.S. antidumping duties, the Obama administration launched a WTO case against China for its restraints on exports of raw materials, including magnesium. That’s right. The [...]

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We are very happy to have Matt Ridley here, to talk about what I think is the foundational issue in economics. The very first paragraph of the second chapter of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations says that economic prosperity rests on the: division of labour… not originally the effect of any human wisdom… [but] the [...]

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A free trade area for Africa, to help the impoverished continent match the spectacular growth of Far East economies, emerged as a distinctive British initiative at the G20 summit today. The anti-poverty strategy, which is partly the brainchild of former Labour minister turned G20 adviser Baroness Vadera, has been developed with Jacob Zuma, the president [...]

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The European Union will block access for Chinese companies bidding for publicly funded contracts unless businesses from Europe get the same access in China, under new proposals tabled in Brussels. The point of having someone coming in to bid for a public contract is so that that public contract gets done more cheaply/better than if [...]

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Merchants are the knights who will save this region from famine and must avoid investing in worthless projects.

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Here. Wonder if my comment will make it through moderation?

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The Chinese need to compromise to secure Doha. So do the Indians, South Africans and Brazilians. But the West should be leading the charge when it comes to freeing-up world trade – not in the name of charity or “development”, but as a result of cool, dispassionate analysis combined with naked economic self-interest. For of [...]

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On the other side if there is no agency problem then deregulation should remain the order of the day.  Trade restrictions create arbitrageurs – and the arbitrageurs ensure the trade restrictions don’t work anyway. Sensible policy.

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There we have it, thirty years ago the world’s centre of economic activity was in the mid Atlantic, today it is around Turkey, in thirty years time it will have reached India and China. This is the new globalization and I’d like to hear how Western politicians plan on dealing with it. Why should politicians [...]

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The Jones Act is that little bit of US protectionism which says that not US owned, not US crewed and not US union rule recognising ships cannot operate either between US ports or in US waters. And here we see some of the costs: Four of the world’s largest oil companies are creating a strike [...]

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Another email from a protectionist containing this gem of a line: Service industries do not produce wealth. No, seriously, they do believe this. They go on: There are a limited number of ways a society can become wealthy. 1. Hunting 2. Gathering 3. Fishing 4. Farming 5. Manufacturing (along with that go the exploitation of [...]

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