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Trade Fact of the Week | February 3, 2010
Counterfeit goods: 2.5 percent of trade?
Total seizures declined slightly - from $270 million to $260 million by value, from 14,992 to 14,841 in total seizures. However, seizures of products especially dangerous to health and safety fell by half, from $62 million in FY2008 to $32 million in FY2009.
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Trade Fact of the Week | January 27, 2010
Scandinavia has the world's highest union-membership rates.
OECD statistics do not break out public and private membership, but find unionization rates down in most rich countries. The big exception is in Scandinavia, where unionization rates are above 60 percent in all five states.
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Trade Fact of the Week | January 20, 2010
The dollar's share of world reserves has dropped.
With a declining dollar value and economic troubles in the United States, the dollar's share of allocated reserves fell to 67 percent in 2005 and 61 percent by late 2009. Holdings of UK pounds and euros are rising as the dollar retrenches.
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Trade Fact of the Week | January 13, 2010
World cyber population 2010: 1.73 billion.
As 2010 begins, about 1.73 billion people are online -- roughly five times as many as the 360 million total for 2000, and more than a quarter of the real world's people.
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Trade Fact of the Week | January 6, 2010
U.S. imports fell by $700 billion last year.
Last year's likely 30 percent drop was the steepest fall in imports since 1938, and sharper than those of the first year of the Civil War, World War I and World War II.
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Trade Fact of the Week | December 23, 2009
World refugee population: 10.5 million.
Based on the available demographic data for 8.2 million refugees, the total refugee count appears to include about 3.2 million children under 12, including 1 million infants and toddlers aged four or younger.
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Trade Fact of the Week | December 16, 2009
Container capacity has doubled, and port transit times dropped by a week, since 2005.
The Middle East, Latin America and Asia have all cut container exports lags by four to five days since 2006, and Africa by 10; and each region has cut import processing even faster. Latin America's 18-day import transit cut, from an average of 39 days to 21 days, is the fastest.
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Trade Fact of the Week | December 9, 2009
U.S. share of scientific research, 2008: ~35%.
In 2008, Americans spent more on R&D than the next four countries combined, and accounted for about 35 percent of OECD's research-spending count. But as impressive as 35 percent may be, it is noticeably less than the 40-percent share American science held in 1998.
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Trade Fact of the Week | December 2, 2009
'Nation-building' often works.
Since an international rebuilding effort began in 2004, Haiti's per capita income has risen from $420 to $660, child mortality has dropped from 84 to 76 per thousand, and life expectancy is up by a year.
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Trade Fact of the Week | November 24, 2009
246,000 foreign students are studying science, engineering and mathematics at American universities.
. Foreign students make up 3.7 percent of American university enrollment: equal to the peak set in the 2001-2002 academic year, before the 9/11 attacks and subsequent visa restrictions began driving numbers down. But though enrollment is up in American universities, their 'market share' has nonetheless dropped over the decade.
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Trade Fact of the Week | November 18, 2009
Exporting to Egypt doubles the price of beef liver.
Exporting raises the average price of a steer carcass from about 70 cents per pound to 85 cents per pound. Per steer, this means an extra $180 in earnings for the rancher, and raises the potential value of the entire 31.6-million American herd by $6 billion.
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Trade Fact of the Week | November 11, 2009
Sixty percent of developing-country workers are "informal."
Close to home, Haiti offers a real-world case. Haiti has about 4.2 million working-age people, about 300,000 of whom have salaried or wage-paying work.
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Trade Fact of the Week | November 3, 2009
Most U.S. foreign direct investment is in rich countries.
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Trade Fact of the Week | October 28, 2009
Recovery will be slow without exports.
St. Augustine's famous youthful prayer - "make me chaste, but not just yet" - finds an echo in 21st-century economic policy. The revival of savings means the shopping that fueled recovery from earlier recessions probably won't be there this time. Americans need to tap foreign sources of growth through exports if the economy and employment are to recover soon.
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Trade Fact of the Week | October 21, 2009
World carbon "emissions intensity" is dropping.
These declines are not fast enough to avert the major climate-change scenarios -- rapid economic growth, especially in large developing countries, means a 3.5 percent annual increase in total emissions in this decade -- but they do imply that we should view laws and international agreements to reduce emissions as efforts to accelerate existing trends, rather than ambitious reorderings of rich-country economic life or blockage of poor-country development prospects.
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Trade Fact of the Week | October 14, 2009
The U.S. raises more money from tariffs on shoes than from tariffs on cars.
Clothes, shoes, luggage, and home linens together accounted for about 5 percent of imports in 2008. But they brought in almost 60 percent of tariff money, since tariff rates on these goods are about 15 times higher than those on other goods.
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Trade Fact of the Week | October 6, 2009
One country in every seven is a European Union member.
In the 18 years since the 1991 Maastricht Treaty created Europe's single market, the European Union has grown from a 12-member 'economic community' concentrated in western Europe to a 27-country political association stretching out to Central Europe, the Balkan peninsula and the Mediterranean island states.
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Trade Fact of the Week | September 30, 2009
World glaciers lose half a meter of ice each year.
The world's three ice-sheets -- East Antarctica, West Antarctica, and Greenland - they cover 15.6 million square kilometers of land, average 1700 km high, and hold over two-thirds of all the fresh water in the world. Greenland's ice sheet, though the smallest of the three, contains more than 10 times as much water as all the surface ice and waterponds and rivers in the world. This is enough water to raise the world sea level by 7 meters, or 23 feet.
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Trade Fact of the Week | September 23, 2009
Governments imposed 155 temporary tariffs in 2008.
Last week's tariff on rubber tires is unusual on two counts -- (a) as the first use of a special clause of China's 1999 WTO accession agreement authorizing easy "safeguard" tariffs (though the Bush administration used a very similar clause to impose a quota on Chinese clothes and household linens between 2006 and 2009), and (b) as a step requested by a trade union rather than a business group. Otherwise the tariff and its likely effects are less dramatic than some reactions suggest.
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Trade Fact of the Week | September 16, 2009
Two-fifths of world health spending is in the United States.
At the WHO's 15.3 percent estimate, Americans spend about twice as much on health as the rest of the world, and 50 percent more than the average for other rich countries.
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