As a result, CEI experts have encouraged and supported trade-enhancing policies and treaties over the years, including “fast-track” Trade Promotion Authority, specific trade deals, and multilateral efforts such as the Doha round of the World Trade Organization. We have opposed increased tariffs, attempts to increase regulation through trade deal language, and the trend toward bilateral rather than multilateral deals. CEI continues to make the case for free trade in the face of increased bipartisan hostility to the idea.
CEI’s experts also work with like-minded colleagues abroad to oppose harmful initiatives, such as working with British colleagues to stop that country’s competition agency from blocking mergers between American firms based on speculative reasoning.
Featured Posts
Blog
Biden says his steel tariffs totally different from Trump’s, speculates uncle was eaten by cannibals
President Joe Biden vowed Wednesday that he would get tough on China’s steel dumping by tripling tariffs on imports. He argued this was totally different…
Blog
Free the Economy podcast: Paying for organs with Pete Jaworski
In this week’s episode we cover the future of AI and employment, why we shouldn’t trust Chinese economic statistics, and how the…
Daily Caller
Fresh Report Explains How International Climate Treaties Benefit China At America’s Expense
CEI’s Ben Lieberman is cited in Daily Caller on the Kigali Amendment: “China’s status as a developing nation in U.N. treaties has created an unfair…
Search Posts
Blog
The Great Italian Auto Bailout — Courtesy of U.S. Taxpayers
At the beginning of 2014, Detroit may be bankrupt, but they're cheering the five-year-old U.S. auto bailout in Italy. That's because after being the beneficiary…
Blog
Fast-Track Trade Authority Is in the Works
It sounds like fast-track authority for trade deals is getting some traction, according to an article today in the Financial Times. The FT says that…
Comment
Balance of Competences Review: Trade and Investment
In December, 2013, Iain Murray of the Competitive Enterprise Institute submitted evidence to the UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills in order to argue…
Blog
COOL Protectionism Still a Hot Issue
A protectionist meat labeling rule requires complicated labeling of beef, pork and poultry to indicate where the animals were born, raised, and slaughtered. Called country-of-origin…
Blog
Two More Strikes against the Export-Import Bank
Two common points made in defense of the Export-Import bank are its recent profitability and the number of jobs it supports. During the recent reauthorization debate,…
Blog
We Didn’t Regulate Credit Cards, We Regulated People
That was the upshot of a panel I spoke at yesterday in New York at the Atlas Liberty Forum. It looked at the impact of…
Blog
Wikileaks’ Latest — Draft IP Chapter in Major Trade Agreement
Wikileaks has made another big splash yesterday -- not about spying, but about a multinational trade agreement currently being negotiated. Wikileaks published a draft…
Forbes
China Builds World’s Largest Temple To Capitalist Materialism
Forget the Great Leap Forward. Forget the Cultural Revolution. Forget the Little Red Book, and the 100 million souls who perished transforming one of the…
Blog
Enflaming, Not Enlightening: George Monbiot on Investment Treaties
George Monbiot in The Guardian, in his usual hyperbolic and specious way, describes the proposed U.S.-EU trade agreement’s purpose as to attack national sovereignty…
News Release
Exit Plan For UK/EU Earns Finalist Spot in Competition
WASHINGTON, Oct. 31 – How might the United Kingdom best extract itself from the European Union? A plan focused on deregulation and put forward by…
Blog
The NSA: Upgrading from Privacy Destruction to Job Destruction
At a recent Cato Institute event on NSA spying activities, the ACLU’s Chris Soghoian stated that NSA activities were not only a threat to…
Blog
Selfishness Underlies the Shutdown, At Home and Abroad
Americans aren’t the only ones talking about government shutdown this week. Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi almost collapsed Italy’s government on Wednesday by threatening…
Forbes
Government Shutdown, Italian Style
Misery loves company, goes the old saying. And in the face of government shutdown, America is not entirely alone. Head to Italy and the average…
Forbes
Lessons from Italy: What happens when businesses are forced to move abroad
Co-written by Emilio Rocca THE 42 employees of Firem, an Italian heating systems maker, returned from their August holidays to find the plant where they…
National Review
Truly Global Free Trade
Co-written by research associate Alex McHugh As the U.S. and several Asian Pacific nations resume discussion this week over the the Trans-Pacific Partnership…
Blog
Before Net Neutrality Eats the World (Part 13): What FCC Should Do Now
(Note: On September 9, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit will hear oral arguments in Verizon’s challenge of…
Fox News
The suspicious science behind ‘happiness’ surveys
Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs, perhaps the world’s leading “sustainability” guru, has a favorite country when talking about progress: the tiny mountain Kingdom of Bhutan. …
Fox News
Europe’s economy needs a real dose of pro-market reform
Recession has been eradicated in Europe. Hooray! Or at least, that’s what recent headlines and grandstanding from political leaders would have you believe. The…
Fox News
Happiness is overrated, says Competitive Enterprise Institute
Using happiness surveys for political purposes is flawed, according to a study from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a libertarian thinktank CEI accuses happiness indices…
WorldMag
Signs and Wonders
Are you happy? One problem with surveys such as the one above is that they measure factors irrelevant to the outcome, and ignore factors vital…
WorldMag
Inside the Beltway: Regulating the Gun Relics
We’re touchy-feely on a global level. Several large scale “happiness” indexes have emerged in recent years from the United Nations and other sources, measuring the…
Blog
CEI Podcast for August 22, 2013: Germany Legalizes Bitcoin
Vice President for Strategy Iain Murray discusses Germany's decision to legalize Bitcoin, a controversial digital currency. With the euro's future up in the air, competing…
Blog
Germany Legalizes Bitcoin: Competing Currencies Are Here!
While Thailand may have banned Bitcoin, the electronic currency — although some are not so sure — the economic powerhouse of Germany has…
Conservative Way Forward
The Eurocrisis Started in Basel
The popular wisdom about the Euro crisis is that it was all the greedy bankers' fault. Yet, we live in a political world, not a…
Blog
Tracking the Cultural Exception, Part Five: There Is Another Way
In the final entry to my series, the question I want to address is more difficult to answer: Why haven’t more countries woken up to…
Blog
Let in More Foreign Doctors to Fix Looming Shortage of Physicians Aggravated by Obamacare
“Bring on the foreign doctors,” writes Slate’s Brian Palmer: If President Obama’s health care reform plan is implemented in its current form, the United…
Comment
Balance of Competences Review: Trade and Investment
Full Document Available in PDF Iain Murray is a British citizen who is Vice President at CEI and heads the…
Blog
Europe’s Continued Stagnation Is Not Surprising, Given Lack of Reform
The Guardian reports that Italy’s record-long economic slump has continued for another quarter. This isn’t much of a surprise given Prime Minister Enrico Letta’s…
Blog
The Misleading Push for the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
Last year, the Senate did not ratify the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, with supporters falling just short of the two-thirds…
Blog
Tracking the Cultural Exception, Part Four: A Double-Edged Sword
Americans generally think of subsidies to audiovisual industries like film and television as a foreign phenomenon. Yet that is hardly the case. In fact, one…
Blog
New USTR Discusses Trade Agenda, How U.S. and EU Can Address Divergent Regulatory Regimes
At a forum this morning hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the new U.S. Trade Representative, Michael Froman, discussed the next steps…
Blog
Tracking the Cultural Exception, Part Three: For Your Grandad’s Audiovisual Industry
Protectionist audiovisual policies are not only inefficient, they’re outdated. Protectionist policies don’t translate into profits because they are built for an audio-visual industry that…
Blog
The HuffPo’s Sloppy Austerity Analysis
Mark Gongloff, a writer for the Huffington Post, claims to show “The Complete Failure of Austerity, In 1 Chart.” Wow! Either he has found…
Blog
Are Markets Rational When It Comes to Economic Fundamentals?
We hear frequently that financial markets thrive on irrational fears. That they are wrong to be wary of unreformed economies and that central banks are…
Daily Caller
A culture of freedom: the first casualty of the U.S.-EU trade deal
Co-written by Research Associate Alex McHugh The proposed trade agreement between the United States and the European Union, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment…
Blog
Gallup: Record Opposition to Closed Borders
A record number of Americans favor allowing more foreigners to enter and live in the United States each year. Nearly a quarter of Americans (23…
Letters
Letter to the U.S. House of Representatives on HR 2642, The FARRM Act
Dear Representative, The House is slated to vote on H.R. 2642, the Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk Management Act (FARRM Act). This bloated…
News Release
House Votes to Permanently Extend Taxpayer Fleecing in Farm Bill
Washington, D.C., July 11, 2013 – Today, the House of Representatives approved the 2013 Farm Bill on a mostly partisan vote of 216-208. No Democrats…
Blog
European Court Invalidates “Whole-Life” Sentences: Fuzzy International Norms Erode Sovereignty, Freedoms, and Safety
It's common to see supporters of U.S. ratification of international treaties claim that they will not radically uproot existing U.S. practices or freedoms, because their…
Blog
Austerity Means Cuts, Not More Spending
Despite its frequent use through the media and in political debate, few journalists and politicians actually use the term “austerity” correctly. But Cypriot Finance Minister…
Daily Caller
Beware the Myth of European Austerity
Beware the Myth of European Austerity “France’s Austerity Drive Pushes Country into Recession.” “How Austerity Has Failed.” Thus proclaim two recent, typical…
Daily Caller
Europe’s lessons on austerity success
With the U.S. national debt about to pass the $17 trillion mark – more than America’s total economic activity in 2012 – and federal interest…
Blog
Tracking the Cultural Exception, Part Two: Exempt from Success
Arguments for cultural exemptions in free trade agreements seem simple -- allow for continued protection for domestic movie/entertainment industries to bolster their viability. But do…
Blog
CEI Podcast for July 2, 2013: The True Story of European Austerity
A new study by Warren Brookes Fellow Matthew Melchiorre finds that only 4 European countries out of 27 have actually cut taxes and spending.
Blog
New Study Dispels Myths of European Austerity
Cries throughout the media of “savage austerity” notwithstanding, only a handful of European countries have actually implemented austerity in the true sense of the term:…
Daily Caller
Who Made Government Big? We Did
After U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke announced recently that the Fed would reduce its asset purchases through mid-2014, financial industry players and the journalists…
Blog
French Cheese Ban: An Attack on “Scientific Principles” in Violation of Treaties Protecting International Trade?
Earlier, we wrote about the U.S. government's de facto ban on the commonplace, perfectly healthy, normal-smelling French cheese mimolette (which I once confused with…
Cato
Banning Fancy French Cheese
I’m no cheese connoisseur. . .But I understand that some people have more refined tastes, and they feel very strongly about the issue. And they…
News Release
European Austerity That Isn’t – What’s Worked, What Hasn’t
Washington, D.C., June 28, 2013 – Most European countries have cut neither spending nor taxes. But European governments that have cut both spending and taxes…
Cato
In Europe Cutting Taxes and Spending Leads to the Best Results
Matthew Melchiorre, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Warren Brookes Journalism Fellow, has written a report on so-called austerity in Europe showing that many…