Much Ado About Nothing?

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The European Commission’s has just published the latest set of EU trade trade figures. Among the surprising details are that overall EU textiles imports were little changed. China textile importas, of course, rose – by 40% – but this was offset by a decline in 54.4% (from Burma) and 41.4% from the Philippines, South Korea, Thailand, Pakistan and Bangladesh also “saw significant falls, by 28.6 per cent, 15.1 per cent, 16.3 per cent and 9.3 per cent respectively”. (all data in value terms and for the first first eight months of the year). As the FT notes the numbers:

“are likely to confirm fears that developing countries are among the main losers after last January’s worldwide removal of textiles quotas.They have struggled to keep up with China’s large and modern clothing production facilities in a liberalised trading environment

“.

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About Edward Hugh

Edward 'the bonobo is a Catalan economist of British extraction. After being born, brought-up and educated in the United Kingdom, Edward subsequently settled in Barcelona where he has now lived for over 15 years. As a consequence Edward considers himself to be "Catalan by adoption". He has also to some extent been "adopted by Catalonia", since throughout the current economic crisis he has been a constant voice on TV, radio and in the press arguing in favor of the need for some kind of internal devaluation if Spain wants to stay inside the Euro. By inclination he is a macro economist, but his obsession with trying to understand the economic impact of demographic changes has often taken him far from home, off and away from the more tranquil and placid pastures of the dismal science, into the bracken and thicket of demography, anthropology, biology, sociology and systems theory. All of which has lead him to ask himself whether Thomas Wolfe was not in fact right when he asserted that the fact of the matter is "you can never go home again".