FACT: Senegal is the U.S.’ fourth-largest source of wigs.

THE NUMBERS: U.S. imports of wigs from Senegal – 

2022:	23.5 million
2020:	19.2 million
2017:	0.1 million
2012:	0.2 million

 

WHAT THEY MEAN:

A sad prediction by an eminent economist, about a decade ago – In The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (2008), Paul Collier says the poorest countries — over 50 of them, with a combined population of 1 billion — had entered a development trap.  The light-manufacturing-export success of Asia and Latin America had blocked the “trade rout” out of poverty for others, particularly in Africa. Geography, regional conflicts, and resource dependence made economic growth difficult and domestic economic reform often futile. Absent major unexpected change, their future looked bleak:

“In the modern world of globalization, there are some fabulous ladders; most societies are using them.  But there are also some chutes, and some societies have hit them.  The countries at the bottom [ed. note: about 58 in his count, with a population of a billion] are an unlucky minority, but they are stuck.”

The alternative book, Charles Kenny’s Getting Better: Why Global Development is Succeeding (2012), proposed the contrary: basic domestic-policy measures in the poorest countries were visibly succeeding, incomes were rising and social indicators improving, and life at the “bottom” was not stuck:

“[T]hose countries with the lowest quality of life are making the fastest progress in improving it across a range of measures including health, education, and civil and political liberties.  The progress is the result of the global spread of technologies and ideas – technologies like vaccinations, and ideas like ‘send your daughter to school.’”

With the intervening decade’s experience, Kenny’s optimistic side of the debate has gained some strength.  Anecdotally, cases like Senegal’s sudden bloom as a wig exporter to the U.S. — 200,000 wigs ten years ago for $4 million, nearly 24 million wigs in 2022 for $44 million, and just a bit fewer in 2023, fourth in the world as a wig supplier behind only China, Indonesia, and fellow-LDC Bangladesh — suggest that the trade route is not blocked.  Rather, unique local industries like Dakar’s inventive hair-sculpting salons and wig factories can, with a bit of luck and advertisement, quickly attract international attention, scale up, and become large export earners and employers.  (See below for a few mini-case studies: coffee from Timor-Leste, clothes from Cambodia and Haiti, and diamonds from ex-LDC Botswana.)  More generally, the World Bank’s estimate of the actual number of poor people in the “bottom” tier — those in absolute poverty, scraping out a living on $2.15 a day or less — has fallen by about 40%, from 1.13 billion in 2010 to 690 million in 2022, as their (real-dollar) per capita income has risen from $896 to $1,117.

From a different angle, the suddenly rapid shrinking of the United Nations’ official list of “least-developed” countries (“LDCs”), suggests a similar national-level trend.  The UN has been keeping this list since 1971, with updates every three years to add new countries or remove ones that have grown out of LDC status. (More detail on how it works below.)  An observer studying the list 15 years ago would have to conclude along with Dr. Collier that it had a flypaper-like quality of almost never releasing anyone – in the 35 years from 1971 to 2006, only Botswana “graduated” (the U.N.’s term), having managed a surge of diamond wealth particularly well.

In the 18 years since, though, six countries have exited the list – Cabo Verde in 2007, the Maldives in 2011, Samoa in 2014, Equatorial Guinea in 2017, Vanuatu in 2020, and Bhutan last December. A cautious person might be still skeptical that this signifies a trend. The six recent graduates are all quite small, combining for 4.7 million people or 0.5% of the worldwide LDC population; four are tropical island countries able to tap tourism revenue; and the fifth, Equatorial Guinea, has a lot of oil, and the number of people living in LDCs remains above 1.1 billion people and an eighth of the world’s population.  But this noted, the U.N. has already scheduled five more graduations in the next three years — Sao Tome e Principe this December; Bangladesh, Laos, and Nepal in December 2026; the Solomon Islands in December 2027 — which will not only shrink the list but reduce the global LDC population by over 200 million.

Looking only slightly further ahead, the U.N.’s spring 2024 “Triennial Review” of the LDC list will consider nine more potential graduates with 110 million more people for 2027 and 2028, including Cambodia, Comoros, Djibouti, Kiribati, Myanmar, Timor-Leste, Tuvalu, and Zambia.   Senegal, with its suddenly booming wig industry, is also on the possible-graduate list, with a Senegal’s figures mirror this, with the same GNI per capita up from $1,117 to $1,410, literacy up ten points, life expectancy three years longer, and the count of Senegalese people in deep poverty down from 42% to 9%.

Not all are likely to go through — Myanmar’s economy has spiraled downward since the coup d’etat late in 2020, and Tuvalu and Kiribati have extreme climate-change vulnerability. But the list by 2028, along with the count of  looks likely to be a lot smaller.  To borrow Kenny’s phrase, it does seem that things are getting better.  And not slowly.

FURTHER READING

The UN’s Least-Developed Country list.

… its explanation of LDC graduation and Triennial Reviews.

… its most recent graduate, the Himalayan monarchy Bhutan, six weeks ago (Dec. 13, 2023).

And the World Bank’s poverty-reduction data-snapshot for Senegal.

Some more explanation:

By “least-developed country,” the UN does not mean “poorest relative to other countries” — say, the twenty poorest as against the 20 richest of the world’s 197 countries.  Rather, the term “LDC” is meant as an objective descriptor, using a stable set of three metrics for income, health and education, and economic and environmental “vulnerability” to describe a country in difficult straits.  The metrics as of the 2021 “Triennial Review” are:

(a)     A national per capita income below $1,088, essentially $3 per person per day;
(b)     A low “Human Assets Index” number which combines three health indicators (maternal mortality, under-five mortality, stunting) and three education indicators (middle school graduation, adult literacy, and gender parity in middle-school-level education); and
(c)     An “Economic and Environmental Vulnerability Index” similarly calculated from a set of five economy-related topics (the agriculture + fisheries + mining share of GDP, “remoteness and landlockedness,” high export reliance on single products or industries, and export volatility), and four environmental or geographical issues (share of people in low-lying coastal areas and arid zones, instability of farm production, and number of disaster victims).

To get off the LDC list, a country must exceed the indicators in two of these three areas. This can involve bringing GDP per capita up above $1,388 and reaching designated above-LDC scores on one of the two indexes, or meeting the indexes without the GDP growth.  (Though this latter option seems quite rare.) Having done it once, the country gets a second review three years later.  If it passes this second exam, it can “graduate” (in the U.N.’s phrasing) and leave the list. A quick table of the list’s extent since its first edition 53 years ago, and the beginnings of dramatic change around 2020:

2028:	33-40?
2027:	42
2024:	45
2020:	47
2010:	48
2000:	51
1971:	52**

* Note that the numbers in this list are anachronistic, as over half of the current LDCs were colonies or parts of other countries in 1971. The original list had 24 countries at the time, and tended to grow larger for about 40 years as countries became independent.  For example, the U.N. added Eritrea, Timor-Leste, and South Sudan after their official independence dates in 1993, 2002, and 2011. 

Trade routes out:

Cambodia: Congress reopened normal trade with Cambodia in 1992. A generation later, Cambodia is the U.S.’ seventh-largest source of clothing, at $11 billion for about 1.25 billion articles of clothing weighing 240,000 tons. Better Work Cambodia, the International Labour Organization’s flagship garment-industry monitoring and training program, is the brainchild of former Commerce Minister Cham Prasidh and negotiations with the Clinton administration in the garment industry’s early 1990s days. Launched in 2001 and replicated in seven other countries, it provides safety inspection and training, rights on the job, and skill development for women workers in 703 garment factories around Phnom Penh.

Timor-Leste: Independent since 1999, Timor-Leste sells Americans about 1700 tons of top-tier coffee each year. The U.N’s look at Timor-Leste’s potential graduation later this decade worries about the possible loss of special LDC trade benefits (in this case the EU’s “Everything But Arms” duty-free program), as the EU oddly applies a 7.5% tariff to roasted coffee (though zero for non-roasted). The U.S. is zero-tariff all the way down for coffee and tea.

Botswana: The Diamond Technology Park just outside Gaborone looks to help Botswanans add value to the stones before they leave Africa. Space for cutters, jewelry-makers, gem and mineral research, and more.

Haiti: The U.S.’ HOPE & HELP programs provide duty-free treatment for about $1 billion in Haitian-made clothing each year, supporting most of Haiti’s industrial jobs and about 7% of GDP.  The program is set to expire in just over a year. PPI’s take last summer.

Senegal: Not much written on Senegal’s wig-export boom so far, but QZ has an in-depth and prescient look at Dakar’s very large domestic hair-sculpting, wig-making, and salon industry just before the international takeoff.

And some data and intellectual background on the “bottom billion”:

Paul Collier is worried (2008).

Charles Kenny thinks it’s going better than many realize (2012).

… and a 2023 data update from the World Bank, estimating the number of people in absolute poverty through 2022 and assessing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic as three lost years for poverty reduction.

ABOUT ED

Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.

Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.

Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

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FACT: 55 countries have ratified the WTO’s 2022 fishery subsidies agreement. They need 55 more by late February.

THE NUMBERS: ‘Capture fisheries’ annual tonnage by country, 2021 –

Country	Total	Ratified WTO Fisheries Agreement?
World:	92.2 million tons	—
China	13.1 million tons	Yes
Indonesia	7.1 million tons	Not yet
Peru	6.6 million tons	Yes
Russia	5.2 million tons	Not yet
India	5.0 million tons	Not yet
U.S.	4.3 million tons	Yes
European Union*	3.7 million tons	Yes
Vietnam	3.5 million tons	Not yet
Japan	3.1 million tons	Yes
Norway	2.6 million tons	Not yet
All other	~34.5 million tons	26 yes, 104 not yet
Non-WTO members**	~1.5 million tons	n/a

* Represents itself and the 27 member states.
** Among countries and territories outside the WTO, top capture fisheries include Iran at 0.8 million tons, Micronesia 0.2 million tons, North Korea 0.2 million tons (World Bank’s estimate), Marshall Islands 0.10 million, Nauru 0.1 million tons, and a group of smaller fisheries countries – Ethiopia, South Sudan, Somalia, Tuvalu, Kiribati, Bahamas – collectively at about 0.3 million tons.

WHAT THEY MEAN:

It’s been sadly difficult to get countries to agree on good things in this century, but as the 164 members of the World Trade Organization prepare for their 13th Ministerial Conference at the end of February, they have a chance.  It has to do with fish:

Fish, Boats, and Money: The world’s fishing fleet — 45,000 big factory-style vessels and 4.1 million small boats — hauls in 80 million tons of “capture” on the high seas and off the world’s seacoasts, and 10 million tons from lakes and rivers. To put this figure in context, all humans put together weigh about 500 million tons (~60 kilos per person x 8 billion people). Various gloomy studies report the consequences: About 100 million sharks are taken each year, declines of up to 90% in counts of large fish, and more than a third of the world’s fishing grounds are unsustainably depleted.

What to Do? In a world of 8 billion humans and their need for protein, shrinking forests and land habitat, and limited new farmland options, no single solution for pressure on marine life seems likely. Aquaculture, limits on particular species, bycatch reduction, bans on especially destructive fishing technologies, etc. all have their part. For the last 25 years, though, the WTO members have been circling around a partial solution, which at least in principle is among the simplest and easiest of all: stop paying people to fish more than they should.

Subsidies: One reason fish counts fall is that governments are paying fishing fleets to get bigger and catch more of them. A widely used count of world subsidies to fishing fleets, done in 2019 by a group of academics at the University of British Columbia (Sumaila et al), yields a figure of $35.4 billion. This is about a tenth of the world’s $400 billion annual fishing industry, and a quarter of the $150 billion in annual fish trade. About $28 billion goes to large boats — pretty easily identified as the least needy recipients; by purpose, $22 billion goes to make fishing fleets larger, and another $7 billion to give them cheap fuel.  By region and top eight countries (counting the EU as a single economy), their rundown of subsidies looks like this:

World Total	$35.4 billion
Asia	$19.5 billion
China	$7.5 billion
Korea	$3.2 billion
Japan	$2.9 billion
Thailand	$1.1 billion
Indonesia	$0.9 billion
Europe	$6.4 billion
EU members	$3.8 billion
Russia	$1.5 billion
U.S./Canada/Mexico	$4.4 billion
U.S.	$3.4 billion
South/Central America	$2.0 billion
Africa	$2.1 billion
Pacific countries	$0.8 billion

 

The WTO: The WTO is well-placed to do something about this, given its mission and since its members includes 49 of the world’s top 50 capture fishery countries, and account for about 97% of world fishing. (The one big fishing country not in the WTO is Iran, whose fisheries account for 0.8 million tons annually or 1% of the total.)  Having debated fishery subsidy controls since 1998, they took a big first step at the 12th Ministerial Conference in June 2022, which “prohibits support for illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing, bans support for fishing overfished stocks, and ends subsidies for fishing on the unregulated high seas,” and now have two opportunities this February:

(a) Bring the 2022 agreement into force. So far, this remains an agreement on paper rather than something that is actually starting to bring down subsidies.  Its entry into force requires ratification by two-thirds of the WTO’s 164 members, or 110 in total.  As of mid-January, 55 have done so. Another 109 — including five of the world’s ten largest fishery countries – have not. Five of the top ten capture fishery countries including the U.S., China, EU, Japan, and Peru have ratified; the other five so far have not. India, Vietnam, Russia, Norway, and Indonesia — and a bit further down the scale, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Thailand, and others — you have 40 days left before the Ministerial.

(b) Finish the work left incomplete last year: The 2022 agreement did not include limits on subsidies contributing to “overcapacity” in national shipping fleets, or to overfishing.  The WTO members (or at least the right-minded ones) hope to complete this by the Ministerial conference in February, working from a text that requires members (with exceptions for least-developed countries and countries such as small islands whose fishing tonnage is very low) to abandon eight kinds of subsidies contributing to overcapacity — ship construction; machinery and technology purchases; fuel, ice, and bait; subsidies for required benefits; salaries and income support for crew; fish prices; at-sea support; and vessel loss or damage — and regular notifications to the WTO of all subsidies with justification for sustainability.

As a final exclamation point, the 2022 agreement — if actually brought into force — lasts only four years and self-terminates if the WTO members can’t agree on the overcapacity limit. If successful, the fisheries subsidy agreements will be something people remember quite a long time into the future, as an example of governments willing to make modest political sacrifices for the general good. If not, well, that would also be something to remember about this generation of political leaders.

FURTHER READING

The WTO:

The WTO’s 2022 agreement on fishery subsidies reduction.

… Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala takes recent ratifications from the U.K. and Gambia.

… and Fisheries Committee Chairman Gunnarsson updates on progress toward a broader agreement.

Subsidy counts:

Rashid Sumaila et al. in Science Direct tabulate a worldwide $35.4 billion in fishery subsidies by region, purpose, large vs. small ships, and more.

… while NGO Oceana reports that $5.4 billion worth of subsidies, or a fifth of the world total, goes to support fleets operating in other countries’ water, and $800 million for high-seas operations.

… and UNCTAD looks at subsidies and sustainability.

Fish & boats:

The World Bank has ‘capture’ fishery totals by country, in tons.

The UN Food and Agricultural Organization’s State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2022 reports on fish take, fleets and employment, sustainability, and more.  The 80 million tons of ocean capture looks like this:

*    67 million tons of fish, led by anchovies, Alaska pollock, and skipjack tuna;
*    5.6 million tons of crustaceans, mostly varieties of shrimp and crab;
*    5.9 million tons of mollusks, topped by squid;
*    0.5 million tons of edible jellyfish, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, and miscellaneous other sea life.

It concludes that “the fraction of fishery stocks within biologically sustainable levels decreased to 64.6% in 2019” from nearly 90% in 1974, and that 35.4% of world fisheries are overfished — take the dead Atlantic cod grounds off New England and Canada as an example — while 57.3% are at “maximum yield” and only 7.2% are “underfished.”

UNCTAD’s World Maritime Review 2023 tracks the world’s merchant fleet.

ABOUT ED

Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.

Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.

Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

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FACT: PPI’s Trade Fact of the Week: A quarter of Ohio’s manufacturing workers work for international businesses.

THE NUMBERS:

U.S. private-sector employment, 2021:	124.38 million
… at foreign-owned businesses:	7.94 million
… U.K.-owned:	1.22 million
… German-owned:	0.92 million
… Canadian-owned:	0.87 million
… Japanese-owned:	0.96 million
… all other countries:	3.97 million

 

WHAT THEY MEAN:

Anxiety-filled comment from Sen. J.D. Vance, an Ohio Republican, last month in response to U.S. Steel’s acceptance of a $14 billion purchase offer from Tokyo-based Nippon Steel:

““Today, a critical piece of America’s defense industrial base was auctioned off to foreigners for cash …”

In fact of course the company was not at “auction” as a sort of estate sale or distressed asset, Japan is not a random group of unknown foreigners but a core U.S. ally, and Nippon Steel is a long-term participant in U.S. metals production. A more temperate comment from Lael Brainard, running the White House’s National Economic Council, says these sorts of transactions can have implications beyond the capital markets, and that the U.S. government has a well-established process for examining them:

“This looks like the type of transaction that the interagency committee on foreign investment Congress empowered and the Biden Administration strengthened is set up to carefully investigate. This Administration will be ready to look carefully at the findings of any such investigation and to act if appropriate.”

Here’s some background:

Steel Output: The world’s steel mills pour about 1.9 billion glowing tons of metal a year.  The World Steel Association’s “World Steel in Figures 2023” summary places China’s 1.018 billion tons at more than half of 2022’s 1.885 billion-ton total, with India a distant second at 125 million tons, Japan third at 89 million tons, and the U.S. fourth at 80.5 million tons.  Six of the world’s 10 largest producers are Chinese; the remaining four include two Japanese firms, one Korean company, and the equivocal Arcelor-Mittal, which is based in Luxembourg but Indian by origin and management. Nippon Steel’s 44.4 million tons of output placed it fourth in the world.  U.S. Steel’s 14.5 million tons ranked 27th worldwide and third in the U.S. after Nucor’s 20.6 million tons and Cleveland-Cliffs’ 16.8 million.

Foreign Investment in the United States: The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, meanwhile, tracks U.S. business investment abroad and foreign investment here. Its most recent annual tally, out last August and covering the year 2021, reports that international businesses employed 7.94 million American workers in 2021 – that is, a modest 6.2% share of that year’s 124.3 million private-sector workers. The international role in U.S. manufacturing is a lot larger, though: 2.81 million American manufacturing workers — about 23% of 2021’s 12.35 million total — go to work daily for international businesses. This includes 153,000 of Ohio’s 675,000 manufacturing workers, mirroring the national 23% employment share and the fourth-largest total of any state.  In Ohio as nationwide, Japanese firms are the top employer and Germans second. By country of origin, the largest groups are:

All manufacturing workers:	12.35 million
U.S.-based firms:	9.54 million
International firms total:	2.81 million
Japanese firms:	0.54 million
German firms:	0.32 million
British firms:	0.24 million
French firms:	0.21 million
Swiss firms:	0.18 million
Canadian firms:	0.15 million

 

By industry, the single largest group of workers at international manufacturers — 512,000 — are in automaking, followed by 426,000 in chemicals and 334,000 in food production.  In “primary metals” (which in BEA’s reports are combined as a group – steel, copper, aluminum, lead, etc.) BEA finds international firms producing $7.1 billion of 2021’s $74 billion in value-added U.S. output and employing 62,000 of the 357,000 total American metal workers. As an example, the Calvert mill in Alabama, with a 5.3 million ton annual capacity, has operated as a joint venture by Nippon Steel and Arcelor-Mittal since 2014, after its 2010 launch by German industrial conglomerate Thyssen-Krupp.

BEA’s “primary metals” employment figure is actually a bit low in historical terms — noticeably down from the 95,000 workers of 2000 and the 92,000 of 2019.  The post-2019 decline appears mainly to reflect Arcelor-Mittal’s 2020 sale of most of its U.S. steel assets (but not the Alabama site) to Cleveland-Cliffs. This event wasn’t especially unusual for FDI transactions, in which ownership occasionally shifts back and forth among the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Japan.  In autos, for example, Fiat’s current ownership of the venerable Chrysler Motors factories — now operating under the name “Stellantis”, with French producer Peugeot also a partner – followed a period of sole U.S. ownership from 2007-2014; and this in turn succeeded the company’s 1998-2007 incarnation as DaimlerChrysler.

U.S. Policy & Institutions: With all this in the background, (a) international participation in U.S. heavy industry in general, or metals specifically, isn’t new, and (b) some purchases, of course, are sensitive by the nature of the industry or the prospective buyer.  To examine and answer the questions they raise — for the defense industry, critical infrastructure, intellectual property, and research, or other reasons — and take such action as might be necessary (if any is needed), the U.S. government uses the long-functioning interagency group Dr. Brainard’s comment cites.

Known as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, “CFIUS”, this is a permanent executive-branch expert group composed of nine agencies — the Treasury Department as the chair, along with the Departments of State, Justice, Commerce, Homeland Security, Energy, and Defense, plus the U.S. Trade Representative and the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. CFIUS reviewed 154 FDI deals in 2022 (some easily decided to be non-controversial, others requiring more investigation), a total slightly below the 164 reviews of 2021 and a bit above the 120 of 2020.  These involved facilities and enterprises ranging from auto parts, metalworking, pharmaceuticals, and boat-building through the information sector such as software publishing and data processing to telecommunications, financial services, and medical labs.

In sum: International businesses are a large and lively part of the U.S. economy, particularly in manufacturing. They carry on lots of research, make lots of cars and a significant amount of metal, and employ about a quarter of the American factory workforce. It’s perfectly reasonable nonetheless to examine new purchase proposals.  And given U.S. Steel’s unusually evocative history — sepia-tinged images of Carnegie, Morgan, and Schwab; mid-20th-century black-and-white reels tagged “Rooting for the Yankees is like …” — emotional reactions aren’t surprising. But neither the basic issues, nor Nippon Steel as a particular company given its significant participation in U.S. metals production over time, are novelties. As Brainard suggests, the government has a perfectly functional way to examine any questions the transaction might raise, and a hyperventilating response probably isn’t very useful.

FURTHER READING

Perspectives on metals:

Sen. J.D. Vance worries.

National Economic Council Chair Brainard suggests a review.

The World Steel Association’s most recent stat summary, with top producing and consuming countries, companies, and trends.

And the Alabama Department of Commerce on international steel investment at Calvert.

Data:

BEA’s summary of foreign multinationals’ U.S. affiliates.

… and data back to 2007.

Looking the other way, U.S.-based multinationals produced about $5.1 trillion worth of goods and services in the U.S. in 2021, and $1.5 trillion abroad, while employing 28.9 million workers in the U.S. and 14.0 million overseas.

And UNCTAD’s World Investment Report has global context.

And CFIUS explained:

U.S. Treasury Department’s background and foreign investment policy guidance.

… and CFIUS’ annual reports with stats and investigation summaries back to 2008.

ABOUT ED

Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.

Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.

Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

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