Word: traded
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...where genteel folk ride their bikes or snack in the open air. But in Asia - not just in Shanghai, but along the Chao Phraya in Bangkok, or in Hong Kong's harbor - waterways are not pretty at all. They are busy places of work and commerce, the arteries of trade, that age-old process of exchange that, more than anything else, has lifted millions of Asians out of poverty in two generations. (See pictures of China on the wild side...
...least, they were. The economic crisis has hit world trade hard. Ports throughout the world are dramatically less busy than they were just a few months ago; air traffic is way down. Exports from Japan were almost 50% less in February compared with the same month in 2008; China's exports were down 26% in February. The World Trade Organization is predicting global trade will shrink by 9% this year, the steepest annual decline since World War II. This contraction is not only deep, it is also a latter-day rarity: global trade has increased continuously year after year since...
...divine. As households in the rich world, battered by a collapse in the values of their assets, start saving again, their appetite for new cars and consumer electronics has diminished. And as banks try to rebuild their shattered balance sheets, capital that would once have been used to finance trade is staying in their vaults...
...reduced demand and financial flows explain the immediate cause of the downturn in trade, a different - and potentially more damaging - specter looms: the return of protectionism. In a recent report, the World Bank found that although the G-20 nations pledged themselves to avoid protectionist measures when they met in Washington last November, no fewer than 17 of them have, since then, "implemented measures whose effect is to restrict trade at the expense of other countries...
...Zoellick got it just about right. Economic historians will long argue about the relative impact of trade restrictions - led by the U.S. Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930 - on the scale of the Great Depression. The U.S. economy was much less integrated into a global economic system then than it is now. But given the retaliation from America's trading partners after the new tariffs were applied, few would argue with Zoellick's assessment that the contraction of trade in the 1930s made the long downturn worse than it needed to be. "Protectionism," British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told TIME recently...