By Michael Stumo
The US International Trade Commission (USITC) and private think tanks usually do “studies” to project the impacts of trade deals. We now have more information on how freakishly wrong those studies are.
Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research recently reviewed the USITC methods for projecting the economic impacts of trade agreements. He reveals that any positive effect found are basically guaranteed by the nature of the model used. Which makes the model useless before you even start.
Baker also found that the USITC projections for past trade deals consistently failed to predict actual outcomes. Further, he found that the methods used exclude – do not consider – any bad things that could go wrong, like unemployment, the impossibility of finding a new job, price hikes, or currency manipulation.
Yet another reason to doubt the globalist cheerleaders when they tell us how great their trade deals will be.
Read the whole Baker review here.
