Zero-Zero Beyond Manufactured Goods -- for ALL International Trade

I began the discussion of adjusting trade tariffs, subsidies and other barriers by only mentioning tariffs and only a small sector of trade. I did that to introduce the idea and to let discussions begin. Then there was a clear sign this was an appealing idea, so I added manufactured goods to see if anyone was still interested. I even suggested that when we begin to think in these larger terms it becomes easier to begin assuming zero-zero as the default and that only special items like food or national security items would be handled differently.

But now it seems there is some interest, perhaps among American businesses as much as from other nations, to simply look at ALL trade between America and another nation as defaulting to the zero-zero standard. Simplicity.

This would simplify the lives of a lot of trade representatives if nations decided to flip from negotiating every item (and there are rather a lot of narrowly specified items) to simply defaulting to zero-zero trade tariffs, subsidies, or barriers and then looking at the exceptions as the odd-balls which have to be negotiated.

I think there is also concern that the current World Trade Organization (the WTO) isn't perfectly suited to this new notion of how things should be handled. I admit I'm not as well-versed on international trade and the WTO as I would like for this discussion, but I know it's a tool the nations use to assist them. It isn't the thing we are to assist or an obstacle to work around. Thus, I would suspect it should be easy enough to work within the WTO or to modify it in some small ways to handle these new relationships.

The main thing I think the WTO could do, and it's something they already do -- adjudicate differences of opinion among nations on the value or existence of trade barriers and monetary values of lost trade. They can assist nations to find the proper tariffs on the 'special items' where one nation needs to protect trade or limit it altogether and the other nation does not. How do you estimate the value of the loss of trade for one nation and how do you ensure that most trade can continue at zero-zero with one or a few special items are handled separately? There has to be some kind of compensation and the WTO is probably well-suited to making those kinds of estimates. If one nation protects an item today, the WTO has to decide if that's true and the monetary value of it. They can continue to do that, but in this other context of assisting nations to make arrangements, rather than just to punish a nation after the fact.

Once a few such zero-zero arrangements are made, it may be easy for other nations to join this and arrange similar deals amongst each other. Perhaps blocs of nations could not only make an agreement with the U.S., but would say that all trade within the bloc would follow those same rules. It would certainly be easier for example, if within the EU bloc or an Asian bloc they would all trade with one another on the same terms.