Re:No free trade agreement if charges of espionage are true,...
by pgeorgi on Monday July 01, 2013 @01:12AM
(#5968787)
Who's that "Germany" Bertelsmann is talking about. The government? The people? Maybe just Bertelsmann and their buddies?
Those 181k new jobs: Will they be propped up with social welfare like many of those "newly generated jobs" in Germany of the last years (Hartz-4 Aufstocker)?
Which part of the work force benefits from the 4.68% income spike - those in the millions-of-euros range (who can easily pull up the medium income because they're so remote from the median)? Or those earning 370€/month (and then will receive a fabulous 387€, leading to no more money in the wallet since most of it came from social welfare anyway)?
If you want to make a point, please don't try to prove it with Bertelsmann "research", most of that is 100% politics.
Free trade would also be an economic boon to Europe and the U.S. A study by the Bertelsmann Foundation together with the Munich-based Center for Economic Studies found that "if the United States and the European Union are able to come together on a far-reaching free trade agreement, Germany would be one of the greatest beneficiaries. Fully 181,000 new jobs could be expected and per-capita income would spike by 4.68 percent." GDP/capita could rise "by 13.4 percent in the US and by 9.7 percent in the UK. More than a million new jobs would result in America. That number would be 400,000 in Britain." [3]
The benefits of free trade are one of the points economists have found consensus on.
[1] http://www.yale.edu/leitner/resources/docs/HORJune09.pdf "Trade Does Promote Peace: New Simultaneous Estimates of the Reciprocal Effects of Trade and Conflict" (Hegre, O'Neal, & Russett, 2009)
[2] http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/014312... The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker
[3] http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/study-on-trans-...