"Trade Wars: Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition"   CEPR Discussion Paper No. DP14079 EDDY BEKKERS ,  World Trade Organization (WTO) Email:  eddy.bekkers@wto.org JOSEPH F. FRANCOIS ,  University of Bern - Department of Economics, Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), Vienna Institute of International Economic Studies (WIIW), University of Adelaide - School of Economics Email:  joseph.francois@gmail.com DOUGLAS NELSON ,  Tulane University - Department of Economics Email:  dnelson@tulane.edu HUGO ROJAS-ROMAGOSA ,  CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis Email:  h.rojas-romagosa@cpb.nl This paper assesses the utility of economic theory of rational trade wars to predict such events or to prescribe courses of action to control their consequences. Trade wars are fundamentally political events whose causes are almost completely political and whose consequences are to a significant degree also political. Contemporary econom...

Did Trump's Trade War Impact the 2018 Election?"   CEPR Discussion Paper No. DP14091 EMILY J. BLANCHARD ,  Dartmouth College - Tuck School of Business Email:  Emily.J.Blanchard@tuck.dartmouth.edu CHAD P. BOWN ,  Peterson Institute for International Economics Email:  cbown@piie.com DAVIN CHOR ,  Dartmouth College - Tuck School of Business, National University of Singapore (NUS) - Department of Economics Email:  davinchor@gmail.com We find that Republican candidates lost support in the 2018 US congressional election in counties more exposed to trade retaliation, but saw no commensurate electoral gains from US tariff protection. The electoral losses were driven by retaliatory tariffs on agricultural products, and were only partially mitigated by the US agricultural subsidies announced in summer 2018. Republicans also fared worse in counties that had seen recent gains in health insurance coverage, affirming the importance of health care as an electio...

Mario Arturo Ruiz Estrada, Donghyun Park, Alam Khan, and Muhammad Tahir.  present a new model on the impact of terrorism on the deglobalization process. The channels are faster poverty expansion, largest flows of refugees, expansion of trade protectionism, and last but not least, the dramatic expansion of economic desgrowth.  This new model is entitled “The Deglobalization Global Evaluation Model (DGE-Model) ”.  The objective of the DGE-Model is to offer policy-makers and researchers a new analytical tool to study the impact of terrorism on the deglobalization process of Muslim countries. The applicability of the DGE-Model is not limited to a specific group of Muslim countries or regions, nor is it constrained by the development stage. In short, the DGE-Model is a simple, flexible and versatile tool to study the link between terrorism and deglobalization. They apply their model to three Muslim countries, namely  Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan for  1999 to 2018,...

"Did Austerity Cause Brexit?"   CEPR Discussion Paper No. DP13846 THIEMO FETZER , University of Warwick Email: t.fetzer@warwick.ac.uk This paper documents a significant association between the exposure of an individual or area to the UK government's austerity-induced welfare reforms begun in 2010, and the following: the subsequent rise in support for the UK Independence Party, an important correlate of Leave support in the 2016 UK referendum on European Union membership; broader individual-level measures of political dissatisfaction; and direct measures of support for Leave. Leveraging data from all UK electoral contests since 2000, along with detailed, individual-level panel data, the findings suggest that the EU referendum could have resulted in a Remain victory had it not been for austerity.

"Funding the Great War and the Beginning of the End for British Hegemony"   CEPR Discussion Paper No. DP13848 MARTIN ELLISON , University of Oxford THOMAS J. SARGENT , New York University (NYU) - Department of Economics, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Email: thomas.sargent@nyu.edu ANDREW SCOTT , London Business School - Department of Economics, Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) Email: ascott@london.edu Britain was the richest country in the world at the outbreak of the Great War, benefitting from all the resources of an industrialised country and a large empire. Funding the war contributed to the beginning of the end for British hegemony. Financiers in London extracted a high price for lending their money to the government to pay for the supplies and munitions needed to win the war. The US extracted a similarly high price for lending to Britain during the war. Russia never paid its war debts to Britain; Fr...

However, the fear of exaggerated globalization is also expressed by serious economic science. There is no unity, but there is a stream that speaks of the recurrence and withdrawal of globalization. One such deglobalization occurred after the Great Depression in the 1930s and the other began after the Great Recession, as Americans call the financial crisis after 2008. Peter van Bergeijk writes about it in Deglobalization 2.0, Trade and Openess . The book has just been published by Elgar Publishing and is also available in electronic form, so I could read at least a summary of the first chapter. ( HERE ) Basically, today's processes of 'deglobalization', ascribed to Trump and Brexit, were much earlier. So we see symptoms, not causes. Like all economic processes, globalization has not only revenues but also costs. In the beginning, revenues grow faster than costs. Greater openness of the economy opens up huge profits that can be partly offered to the population in the form o...

It has become fashionable to compare the current rise of populism to the political developments of the 1930s and the aftermath of the Great Depression. In my view, however, investors can learn more from a comparison with the Gilded Age of the late 19thcentury and the years leading up to World War I.  https://klementoninvesting.substack.com/p/echoes-of-the-gilded-age-part-1-economics