As President Trump prepares to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in mid-May, a new U.S.-China Board of Trade appears to be taking shape as a key mechanism to manage the trading relationship between the world’s two largest economies. U.S. Trade Representative Greer suggested in March that this new piece of trade architecture for the bilateral relationship could identify non-strategic products to be traded on a managed basis between the two countries.
But this isn’t the first time that a ‘managed trade’ approach has been pursued by the U.S. During the trade wars with Japan in the 1980s and 1990s, the U.S. employed such an approach to limit Japanese imports into the U.S., while promoting American exports to Japan. The strategy included numerical targets, voluntary export restraints, plus qualitative and quantitative criteria. It resulted in Japan limiting automotive exports to a specified number of vehicles, establishing a guaranteed market share for U.S. semiconductors in the Japanese market, and opening its market in such sectors as telecommunications and medical technology. It was a policy that focused on determined outcomes in the marketplace instead of the rules-based approach that has been the core of most trade agreements.
Featured Speakers
Ambassador Craig Allen, Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis
Wendy Cutler, Senior Vice President, Asia Society Policy Institute
Stephen P. Vaughn, Partner, King & Spalding
Moderator: Bob Davis, former Wall Street Journal editor