Tag: Economics

  • China's 2008 Labor Law: Does It Work, or Is It Just a Financial Burden?

    Our friend Lyle Morris has a well-reported piece at YaleGlobal on China’s new labor law, which went to effect at the beginning of this year. Under the law, which affects both domestic and foreign companies operating in China, workers will see increased protection from labor unions and significant overhauls in policy ranging from contract formation…

  • Tacos in China

    A Mexican mall opens in China—good news for China residents who like good tequila. But the mall is a rare example of Mexico selling to China. Usually China does the exporting, to Mexico and to Mexico’s most important market, the United States. Mexican companies are struggling to compete. The Mexican consulting firm Latinasia will inaugurate…

  • 100 Years Since Taft's 'Open Door' Speech, Remembering Diplomacy

    I was delighted today to find a print edition of today’s International Herald Tribune in Beijing, a feat I thought impossible until the couple next to me drinking coffee could be seen peering over the top of their IHTs and deriding Thomas Friedman’s column (which curiously isn’t in today’s edition). I asked where they’d gotten…

  • Chile Sees Increased Transpacific Trade After FTAs

    [This is the first of what I hope will be many posts on Latin America by my friend and frequent collaborator Dorothy Kronick. Dorothy’s reporting from Caracas, Venezuela, where she was a Fulbright Scholar, was published in The New Republic, The American Prospect, and the Chilean business magazine AméricaEconomía. She now lives in Buenos Aires,…

  • What Exactly Is Fair Trade? I Interview an Expert.

    Today my newly-former employer publishes my interview with Fair Trade and international economics expert Jonathan Jacoby of the Center for American Progress. I always found myself wondering how exactly Fair Trade is put together, especially when confronting such things as a favorite coffee roaster Intelligentsia’s “Direct Trade” program, which claims to pay farmers even more…