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Nobel Laureates Support
China's Entry Into WTO
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A group of well-known American economists, including 13
Nobel prize winners and 10 former chairs of the Council of Economic Advisors, have put out
a letter urging support for China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO)
The letter was presented at a White House briefing on Tuesday by Gene Sperling, Director
of the National Economic Council; Martin Bailey, Chairman of the Council of Economic
Advisors; Lawrence Summers, Secretary of the Treasury; and Robert M. Solow, Professor
Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Solow is one of the 13 Nobel laureates who have joined the White House in its stepped-up
efforts to publicize the significance of China's entry into the world trading bloc. Among
the Nobel prize winners are also Kenneth Arrow, Paul Samuelson, Milton Friedman and Robert
Lucas.
"China's entry into the WTO will help sustain the process of market-oriented reform
that began there two decades ago," the economists said.
"These reforms, which have emphasized reliance on markets and openness to trade and
foreign investment and have helped to raise the standard of living of the average Chinese
citizen nearly five-fold since 1979," Bailey said.
Solow said that China's entry into the WTO will give American businesses and workers
access to a large market of a billion and a quarter people, which needs "an awful lot
of stuff for a very long time."
"On the whole it's better for us when our trading partners are rich than when our
trading partners are poor; and for China to keep growing in economic terms is an advantage
for us," he said.
Summers said that the Congressional vote on China's trading status, which is scheduled for
the week of May 22, is likely "to appear in a prominent way in history books 25 or 50
years from now, "and he hoped that the vote will become "a significant step
forward in American's global economic relations."
"I think we would be sacrificing a very important opportunity to advance American
national interests within China and American national interests in what happens to China
if PNTR were not to pass this year," he said.
He called it "a once-in-a-generation event" to get such a large number of
economists with a broad spectrum of political views to reach consensus on a major public
policy issue like the trading status with China.
Sperling stressed the need to de-link such issues as human rights, labor rights and
religious rights from trading with China. These issues, he said, should not be handled
"in a way that is WTO inconsistent" or "would be conditional on a trade
agreement like China."
Sperling implied that rejecting China PNTR would lead to such a situation "in which
we will open up the largest-growing market in the world to our competitors, but then go
out of our way to deny those benefits to ourselves."
This practice, he added, would be "the closest thing to unilateral economic
disarmament possible."
Describing the upcoming debate and vote on China PNTR as "a tough battle,"
Sperling expressed his sanguine view that in the end "the votes will come together
and that we will prevail."
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