The World Trade Organization on Wednesday handed a fresh victory to China, permitting it to place duties on $645 million worth of U.S. imports per year, in a long-running anti-dumping dispute with Washington.

The United States is unable to appeal the decision.

“The deeply disappointing decision today by the WTO arbitrator reflects erroneous Appellate Body interpretations that damage the ability of WTO members to defend our workers and businesses from China’s trade-distorting subsidies,” said Adam Hodge, a spokesman for the U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai.

“Today’s decision reinforces the need to reform WTO rules and dispute settlement, which have been used to shield China’s non-market economic practices and undermine fair, market-oriented competition.”

The WTO green light does not mean China will automatically impose the tariffs, in whole or in part, on U.S. imports.

The figure was revealed in an 87-page decision by a WTO arbitrator on the level of countermeasures Beijing could request in its dispute with Washington regarding US countervailing duties (CVD) on certain Chinese products.

The dispute stretches all the way back to 2012, when the WTO set up a panel of experts to try to settle a complaint filed by China over what it said were unfair duties imposed by the United States.

Washington had justified the additional tariffs on products ranging from paper to tires and solar panels, arguing they were being dumped on the market to help Chinese companies grab business.

The WTO Dispute Settlement Body ruled in China’s favor, and the ruling was upheld by its appeals judges in 2014, paving the way for China to retaliate.

Beijing initially asked to be permitted to place tariffs on $2.4 billion in U.S. products each year, but then scaled back its demand to $788.75 million.  

The United States had argued that the appropriate level should not exceed $106 million per year.

The anti-dumping duties are permitted under international trade rules as long as they adhere to strict conditions, and disputes over their use are often brought before the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Body.  

Wednesday’s decision marks the second time the WTO has allowed China to retaliate for U.S. anti-dumping duties deemed to be in violation of international trade rules.

In November 2019, a WTO arbitrator permitted China to add duties on up to $3.6 billion worth of U.S. imports, in a separate case.

So far, China has not notified the WTO that it has implemented the approved retaliatory tariffs from that case.  

Washington has long complained about the WTO dispute settlement system, and especially its appeals court, claiming unfair treatment.

Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump brought the system to a grinding halt in December 2019 by blocking the appointment of new judges to the Appellate Body.
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Wednesday’s signal from the U.S. Federal Reserve on impending interest rate increases is expected to have ramifications beyond America’s shores.

The Fed’s Open Market Committee announced it was keeping, for now, the target range for a key interest rate at near zero but cautioned that with inflation well above 2% and a strong labor market, it expected “it will soon be appropriate to raise the target range for the federal funds rate.”

The federal funds rate is the interest rate commercial banks charge each other for overnight loans of their excess reserves.

“The committee is of a mind to raise rates at the March meeting,” Fed Chairman Jerome Powell told reporters Wednesday. “We have our eyes on risks around the world, but the economy should hold up.”

As the dollar serves as the primary international reserve currency, a U.S. interest rate hike would pressure central banks of other countries to also raise their rates for those who want to borrow money.

“The rest of the world has a lot of dollar debt, and even if their debt is in local currencies, their central banks will often have to raise interest rates to offset the U.S. rate increases to try to maintain some currency stability,” said Gerard DiPippo, senior fellow with the economics program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“Raising interest rates is aimed at stifling consumer demand to address all of this money that’s sloshing around in our economy, and that’s going to affect consumers here, as well as producers of goods and other countries that rely on the U.S. market,” said Sarah Anderson, global economy project director at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Inflation ‘transmitted through trade’

Inflation in the United States is at a 40-year high amid surging consumer demand for goods, a strengthening domestic job market and pandemic-caused supply chain disruptions, including for critical semiconductors.

“The price of U.S. exports increased by more than the price of U.S. imports last year, so in a sense, the U.S. is exporting inflation because the cost of producing things in the U.S. has increased faster than the imports going into it from overseas. So, the inflation can be transmitted through trade,” DiPippo told VOA.

Some economists and policy analysts see the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden confusing structural and cyclical economic matters as it struggles to tame inflation.

“The cyclical phenomenon — inflation — over the next year or so, really only the Fed has the tools to deal with that,” DiPippo said. “Even if the Biden administration is able to increase subsidies to produce things in the United States or increase competition through regulation, those things take time. And we’re talking about inflation over the next year or two, not over the next five years. So, there’s a mismatch.”

The White House has repeatedly said that it is prioritizing lowering prices to help American households and that the best way to accomplish it is through increased competition.

“Competition results in lower prices for families. Competition results in fair wages for workers. And as you all know, competition encourages companies to innovate,” Biden said on Monday during a meeting of the White House Competition Council.

Prices have been surging in the United States and other countries since last year amid serious shortages of workers and the goods they produce. That has the International Monetary Fund predicting slower growth and faster inflation for the world’s biggest economies.

“People have shifted from spending money on services, like going out to restaurants and theaters, during the pandemic to buying more stuff,” Anderson told VOA. That has put more pressure on manufacturers, especially in countries such as China and Vietnam, which are having difficulty keeping pace with demand because so many workers have been sidelined by the pandemic.

“We can raise interest rates, but I don’t think the problem is going to go away until we end the pandemic,” Anderson added.

China’s “No-COVID policy may cause more lockdowns,” exacerbating the supply chain woes, Powell, the Fed chair, warned on Wednesday. “There’s plenty of risk out there.”
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The United States issued an advisory Wednesday warning of the increased risk of conducting business in Myanmar nearly a year after a military coup in the Southeast Asian country, which is also known as Burma. 

The advisory from the U.S. State Department warned it was especially risky for “individuals, businesses and financial institutions and other persons” to be associated with business activity in Myanmar “that could benefit the Burmese military regime.” 

The advisory cited the possibility of exposure to illegal financial and reputational risks by doing business there, and using supply chains controlled by the military. 

“The coup and subsequent abuses committed by the military have fundamentally changed the direction of the economic and business environment in Burma,” the advisory said. 

Former de factor leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) led Myanmar since its first open democratic election in 2015, but Myanmar’s military contested the November 2020 election results, claiming widespread electoral fraud, largely without evidence.

The military removed the NLD government in a coup on Feb. 1, 2021, detaining Suu Kyi and President Win Myint.

Since then, the military government has used deadly force in clampdowns on protests while escalating efforts to neutralize ethnic minority armies and newly formed militias allied with the NLD government. Wednesday’s advisory said the military “has killed more than 1,400 innocent people” since its takeover. 

The advisory said state-owned enterprises were of greatest concern, as well as the gems and precious metals, real estate, construction and defense industries, noting that they have been identified as providing economic resources for the junta. 

The advisory was issued after oil giants Chevron Corporation and TotalEnergies said last week the worsening humanitarian situation prompted them to withdraw from the country, where they were working together on a major gas project. 

 
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Такі пакети допомоги стали б «додатковою подушкою» і могли б гарантувати стабільність фінансової системи України «незалежно від того, як розвиватиметься ситуація», вважають в Офісі президента
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The fight against corruption has stagnated over the past decade amid human rights abuses and democratic declines in all regions of the world, according to an analysis by Transparency International. 

The organization’s Corruption Perception Index ranks 180 countries by perceived levels of public sector corruption using a scale of zero (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean), using data from dozens of sources, including the World Bank.

Stagnation

The 2021 report shows that in 86% of countries, there has been little or no improvement over the past decade. 

“Out of the 180 countries we have in the index, 134 have stayed more or less where they were in 2012,” said Roberto Kukutschka, a research coordinator at Transparency International who helped compile the report. 

“We only see some significant improvement in 25 of the countries around the world. At the same time, however, we see that 23 countries have declined. And we see this … across all the regions in the world. The only place where we do not see any significant improvement, however, is in the Middle East and North Africa,” Kukutschka told VOA.

The top countries are Denmark, Finland and New Zealand, which all score 88 out of 100 on the index.

Democratic declines

Several Western democracies have slipped in the rankings, including the United States, Canada, and Australia.

“There is something happening [in] the countries that were formerly at the top of the index,” Kukutschka said. “So when we look at countries like Canada, the United States or Australia — [they] used to be high-fliers in our index and were always promoting the fight against corruption, not only in their countries, but also abroad — are starting … to slide down the index.

“This is a wake-up call for many of the countries at the top of the index,” he added. “They need to take care of their institutions; they need to pay attention to the issue of corruption, because I think it is much harder to build back what you lost than to preserve what you have and improve from there.”

Press freedom

“We have also had the spread of disinformation and fake news, which weakened, I think, the credibility of one of the most important watchdogs for anti-corruption, which is the media and the press,” Kukutschka told VOA.

Some European Union member states have also fallen sharply on the corruption index over the past 10 years, including Poland and Hungary.

“We have seen a clampdown on press freedom,” Kukutschka said. “We have seen also a clampdown on academic freedom, even with some universities having to leave the country.”

Conflict

Somalia, Syria and South Sudan — countries riven by years of conflict — remain at the bottom of the index. Twenty-seven nations are at historic lows on the corruption scale, including Cyprus, Lebanon and Honduras.

Perceived corruption in Mali has increased following successive military coups. The Philippines under President Rodrigo Duterte has seen a big increase in corruption alongside a crackdown on freedom of expression. Similarly, perceived corruption in Venezuela has sharply increased under President Nicolas Maduro.

Most Improved

There are notable improvements in the Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia, and especially in Armenia, says Kukutschka. “The old government was ousted by civil protests a few years ago, and now we have a more reformist government that is really committing to the fight against corruption.”

Transparency International identified a clear pattern in the data: the link between anti-corruption and democracy. 

“Complacency in fighting corruption exacerbates human rights abuses and undermines democracy, setting off a vicious spiral,” the report says. “As these rights and freedoms erode and democracy declines, authoritarianism takes its place, contributing to even higher levels of corruption.”
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«Ситуація, коли на рахунках лежать десятки мільйонів гривень залишку, а медичний колектив працює за мінімалку – абсолютно неприпустима», заявив міністр
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The International Monetary Fund’s board “urged” El Salvador to do away with its move to make bitcoin a legal tender, while calling for strict regulation of the country’s e-wallet. 

IMF board members “urged the authorities to narrow the scope of the Bitcoin law by removing bitcoin’s legal tender status,” the IMF said in a Tuesday statement following a yearly consultation. 

Salvadoran Finance Minister Alejandro Zelaya had no comment. 

In September, El Salvador became the first country to make bitcoin a legal tender, alongside the U.S. dollar. Its economy has been dollarized for two decades. 

The IMF has since repeatedly called for the move to be reversed, citing financial, economic and legal concerns. 

The IMF board said it was important to boost financial inclusion and that the Chivo e-wallet, the government’s bitcoin exchange, could play this role. 

However, they see “the need for strict regulation and oversight of the new ecosystem.” 

Some board members were also concerned about the risks associated with El Salvador’s expected issuance of bitcoin-linked bonds, the IMF said. 

The country is preparing the issuance of $1 billion in bonds, half of which would be used to purchase bitcoin. The government bets that the exposure to bitcoin gains will entice investors who would receive a dollar yield of 6.5%, much lower that what the market currently prices for similar Salvadoran government debt, closer to 17%. 

In its statement, the IMF also warned that at current debt spending levels El Salvador’s public debt could rise to about 96% of GDP in 2026, calling it an “unsustainable path.”

 
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«Інколи бізнес може бути більш загартований, ніж деякі політики», сказав голова АТП в Україні
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The International Monetary Fund has lowered its forecast for the global economy’s growth this year, citing the spread of the omicron variant of the coronavirus as a notable factor.

In a quarterly update of its World Economic Outlook, the IMF predicted the global economy would expand 4.4% in 2022, lower than the 5.9% forecast one year ago and the 4.9% growth rate predicted in October. 

The report also cited higher energy prices, rising inflation and larger than predicted slowdowns in the United States and China, the world’s largest economies, as reasons for lowering its global growth forecast. 

“The global economy enters 2022 in a weaker position than previously expected,” the IMF said in the report. “The emergence of the omicron variant in late November threatens to set back this tentative path to recovery.”

The 190-country lending agency cut its growth forecast for the U.S. to 4% from the 5.2% it predicted in October. The agency said it lowered growth forecast for the U.S. economy because President Joe Biden’s massive Build Back Better social policy bill has stalled in Congress.

The U.S. central bank’s tighter monetary policy and supply chain problems that have plagued U.S. manufacturers and other businesses were also factors in the revised forecast, the IMF said.

The agency slashed China’s growth expectations to 4.8% this year, dramatically lower than the 8.1% forecast last year and nearly 1% lower than what it expected in October. 

China’s zero-tolerance approach to the coronavirus pandemic and related lockdowns have slowed private consumption while the real estate sector remains in a “period of protracted stress,” the IMF said.

After the global economy expanded nearly 6% last year, Tuesday’s IMF report cut growth projections for nearly every country. India was a notable exception, with the IMF raising its projected growth rate by 0.5% to nine percent.
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У середу офіційний курс становитиме 28,66 гривні за долар порівняно з 28,37 гривні у вівторок
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