Must-Read: Paul Krugman: TPP Take Two
: TPP Take Two: “What I know so far: pharma is mad because the extension of property rights in biologics is… shorter than it wanted…
…tobacco is mad because it has been carved out of the dispute settlement deal, and Rs in general are mad because the labor protection stuff is stronger than expected. All of these are good things…. I’ll need to do much more homework…. But it’s interesting that what we’re seeing so far is a harsh backlash from the right against these improvements. I find myself thinking of Grossman and Helpman’s work on the political economy of free trade agreements, in which they conclude, based on a highly stylized but nonetheless interesting model of special interest politics, that: “An FTA is most likely to politically viable exactly when it would be socially harmful.” The TPP looks better than it did, which infuriates much of Congress.