Word: tariff
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...past. Nearly eight decades ago, as the Great Depression was beginning to plunge the United States into ever-greater economic peril, Congress—at the behest of the agricultural and industrial lobbies—passed the highest set of import duties in American history, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. The results were disastrous; according to the State Department, “while the tariff might not have caused the Depression, it certainly did not make it any better. It provoked a storm of foreign retaliatory measures… Such policies contributed to a drastic decline in international trade...
...With all due respect, the senator should know better. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, perhaps the best-known protectionist law in history, erected tariff barriers for over 20,000 products after the Wall Street crash in 1929. It may have gotten the lawmakers that passed it reelected, given the short-term boost in domestic demand, but it was a cataclysmic event for the global economy in the medium and long run: Countries soon became entangled in a protectionist race and subsequent trade war that caused American foreign trade (imports and exports) to almost halve. According to Milton Friedman...
...past, India and China have often worked together at the WTO on issues of common interest such as seeking an end to agricultural subsidies and non-tariff barriers in developed countries' markets. But the current trade dispute may be divisive partly due to the dire straits of China's toy industry. The Chinese Ministry of Commerce last month announced that nearly 1,000 Chinese toy exporting companies in its Guangdong province had closed...
...China trade rumble. Both countries are in the midst of serious economic pain, which trade tensions would only worsen. There are enough comparisons with the Great Depression out there already without dredging up the memory of Smoot-Hawley, the 1930 legislation in the U.S. that put a tariff on some 20,000 imported goods - to devastating effect on trade...
...subsidies that helped support the rapid growth of alternatives in countries like Spain and Germany are being scaled back just as the technologies have taken off. At the moment, Germany has some 60% of the solar panels in the world, thanks in part to the so-called feed-in tariff, which guarantees that utility companies will buy renewably generated power at above market rates. But further growth could stall. Corn ethanol in the U.S. - which many environmentalists believe doesn't deserve the term "renewable" - has cratered, also hurt by rapidly falling gas prices. Most of all, however, clean tech businesses...