April 04, 2007

A spaghetti bowl might give more jobs… to some

Sir, Martin Wolf makes a splendid case for how the free trade reforms could be handled better than when “A Korean-American strand enters trade’s spaghetti bowl”. April 3.

What he might turn his eyes blind to (quite appropriate for a columnist of his statute) is that many or perhaps even most of those working on free-trade-issues might be following their own expanded agenda of working-on-free-trade-issues and in that respect, to try to make sense out of a spaghetti bowl, seems to guarantee much more jobs than a straightforward single WTO.

I do concur with Wolf when he mentions that “a single trade agreement open up to any single country prepared to sign up” could be a much more useful template since indeed, if free trade is really as good as we say it is, then why should we negotiate about it. I mean, you do not go to a nudist camp to play strip-poker!