U.S. Trade Lobbying Strategy for the 21st Century
It is rare to find an American company that is not developing a market strategy to benefit from the rapid growth of emerging markets such as Brazil, India, and China. Yet when it comes to the international nonmarket rules for business, American firms have disengaged just at the time when these emerging markets are asserting themselves in global dealmaking. New rules for the world economy are no longer negotiated across the Atlantic, as they were in the decades after 1945. As the recent deadlock in the latest Doha Round talks in the World Trade Organization (WTO) illustrates, it’s not clear that U.S. corporate groups have shed their “my way or the highway” lobbying strategies. It is time for U.S. business to rethink what it wants on major global talks on trade (and climate change, for that matter).
As more and more firms copy each others’ best practices, many of the remaining critical elements of the business environment are determined by governments. These include, among others, access to foreign markets for investments, protecting intellectual property, or visas for skilled, temporary staff. Governments negotiate these matters and smart businesses make sure that their governments know their needs. During the heyday of American power after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the U.S. government was able to secure some terrific trade deals on behalf of American business. No more.