This person is no longer with the Carnegie Endowment.
Viji Rangaswami was an associate in the Trade, Equity, and Development Project at the Carnegie Endowment. She was formerly minority trade counsel to the Committee on the Ways and Means in the U.S. House of Representatives. Her work focuses on how multilateral and regional trade agreements, as well as unilateral preference programs, can promote development, particularly among the least developed countries.
Rangaswami served for six years with the Committee. She played a key role in legislation granting permanent normal trade relations status to China and extending unilateral trade preferences to various regions, including sub-Saharan Africa.
Rangaswami also worked with both the Clinton and Bush Administrations to implement major trade initiatives, including free trade agreements with Jordan, Chile, Singapore, Australia, and Morocco. She provided oversight and advice to members of Congress on ongoing trade negotiations, with particular emphasis on the Doha Round, the FTAA, Central America, and the Southern African Customs Union. She also advised members on issues such as textiles and apparel trade, intellectual property rights, unfair trade practices, WTO dispute settlement, and customs administration .
Before joining the Ways and Means staff, Rangaswami was an associate at the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, working in the area of international trade. She has served as a visiting lecturer at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School and as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law School.
Selected Publications: Feast or Famine: US Trade Policy in 2001 (Bridges, 2001); "Joltin' Joe Has Left and Gone Away - Embracing Change: The Way Forward for US Trade Policy and the WTO", (Journal of Law and Policy in International Business, 2000)
Discussants focus on the likelihood that fast track trade negotiating authority will be renewed before it expires next June.
Global trade talks at the WTO were suspended indefinitely because key countries could not agree on how deeply to reduce tariffs on farm products and farm subsidies. Without real concessions, these talks will fail, and the world will lose an important opportunity to integrate the poorest and most marginalized countries into the global economy.
The real reason more countries do not benefit from the U.S. Generalized System of Preferences is that the program excludes the very products most developing countries can competitively produce, which primarily benefits developed countries and non-GSP countries at the expense of countries with large poor populations.
The U.S. should provide open access for least developed country exports, which would yield real benefits to the global poor and allow the U.S. to reclaim its leadership position in the struggling WTO round.
Development finance institutions that lend to private firms in developing countries have started to require borrowers to adhere to national and international labor standards in their operations. Carnegie and the ILO brought together practitioners to discuss the process of implementing labor standards and to share best practices to achieve success on the ground.
Carnegie hosted a discussion with Congressman Sander Levin on free trade agreements with Latin America.
In the wake of the WTO's elimination of apparel export quotas, analysts predict that China and a handful of other efficient, low-cost producers will dominate the global market within a few years, shutting smaller, less industrialized countries out of an industry that created millions of jobs and often was the first step in the process of industrialization.
The Carnegie Endowment recently hosted a conference on the Cambodian apparel sector, which has been revolutionized by an innovative trade agreement that helped create jobs and improve working conditions. Government officials, representatives from NGOs, intergovernmental organizations, and the private sector discussed how Cambodia's experience can be improved and replicated elsewhere.
Carnegie hosted a workshop on IISD's Model International Agreement on Investment for Sustainable Development, which aims to ensure that foreign investment creates development benefits in host countries.