Direction of Trade Statistics, December 2018

Direction of Trade Statistics, September 2018

The Model Rules of Professional Conduct provides an up-to-date resource for information on legal ethics. Federal, state and local courts in all jurisdictions look to the Rules for guidance in solving lawyer malpractice cases, disciplinary actions, disqualification issues, sanctions questions and much more. In this volume, black-letter Rules of Professional Conduct are followed by numbered Comments that explain each Rule's purpose and provide suggestions for its practical application. The Rules will help you identify proper conduct in a variety of given situations, review those instances where discretionary action is possible, and define the nature of the relationship between you and your clients, colleagues and the courts.

This report, which comprises three booklets, provides a comprehensive analysis of the crime of trafficking in persons and how different countries are responding to this crisis. Countries worldwide have been detecting and reporting a larger number of victims and are also convicting more traffickers than ever before. This may well be the result of an increase in the capacity to identify victims over the last few years. While the number of reporting countries did not significantly increase, the number of victims reported in different countries did increase. The trend has unfortunately been growing over the past few years.

This paper discusses that shipments to and from free-trade zones and bonded warehouses, exclusion of military and other confidential items and government goods, value thresholds for customs registration of shipments, returned goods, and other goods missed by customs (or surveys) are examples of coverage differences that can result in inconsistencies. As a result of reporting and processing lags, trade data for a given period are often released before all customs documents for the period have been processed. These data are sometimes not revised, or, if data are revised, errors are nevertheless made in assigning the date on which goods are shipped or received and the late data are assigned to the wrong month, quarter, and/or year. Errors can also be made in assigning a destination to exports and an origin to imports during customs clearances, or in cases when the ultimate destination is changed after the initial consignment during transshipment, the change is not incorporated into published statistics via the release of revised data.

One of the world’s leading experts on international trade explains that we must look beyond globalization to explain rising inequality. Globalization is not the primary cause of rising inequality. This may come as a surprise. Inequality within nations has risen steadily in recent decades, at a time when countries around the world have eased restrictions on the movement of goods, capital, and labor. Many assume a causal relationship, which has motivated opposition to policies that promote freer trade. Elhanan Helpman shows, however, in this timely study that this assumption about the effects of globalization is more myth than fact. Globalization and Inequality guides us through two decades of research about the connections among international trade, offshoring, and changes in income, and shows that the overwhelming conclusion of contemporary research is that globalization is responsible for only a small rise in inequality. The chief causes remain difficult to pin down, though technological developments favoring highly skilled workers and changes in corporate and public policies are leading suspects. As Helpman makes clear, this does not mean that globalization creates no problems. Critics may be right to raise concerns about such matters as cultural autonomy, child labor, and domestic sovereignty. But if we wish to curb inequality while protecting what is best about an interconnected world, we must start with a clear view of what globalization does and does not do and look elsewhere to understand our troubling and growing divide.

Finck examines the emergence of blockchains (and other forms of distributed ledger technologies) and the implications for regulation and governance.