International trade concerns the movement of the factors of production, changes in their ownership and the movement in and goods and services. In classical economics, the factors of production are land, labor, and capital. Land cannot move but its ownership and its use can change. Labor and capital can move across borders. Goods and some services can also move across borders. In this blog, I argue that the discovery of efficient means to allocate goods, services, and the factors of production across the world is a complex process. It cannot be centrally planned. Furthermore, economic complexity is a veritable form of crisis preparedness. International trade serves to enhance that preparedness.
I use the example of the recent US-China trade war and the Covid-19 pandemic to illustrate that the principle of comparative advantage endures in its veracity. We are better off when we specialize and trade.
The charts above offer a month by month breakdown in the evolution of China’s trade balance with the United States, Chinese exports to that country and Chinese imports from that country. In December 2017, China’s trade surplus with the U.S. was $25.6 billion. By 2020, the surplus had widened to $31.4 billion. Chinese exports to the U.S. grew while imports from the U.S. shrank. In 2018, Trump launched a trade war against China. The objectives of this trade war were to reduce the value of Chinese exports to the U.S. and reduce the U.S. trade deficit with China. These graphs illustrate that, on both accounts, the trade war did not meet its objective. Instead, the opposite occurred . The value of Chinese exports to the U.S. increased. China’s trade surplus with the U.S. grew. Additionally, a 2019 study by Moody’s analytics estimated that the trade war exacted a cost of 300,000 jobs and 0.3% of real GDP to the U.S. economy. The cost of the trade war was also felt by U.S. companies. U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports cost that group $US 1.7 trillion in stock prices . The latest reports reveal that the Biden administration is undertaking a review of the trade restrictions put in place by the Trump administration.
An observer might question the slow, apparently deliberate effort by the Biden administration to review the trade restrictions in question. This response by the Biden administration is in stark contrast to the furious pace of executive orders, actions and memorandums on other issues. By March 8, 2021, President Joe Biden had signed an excess of 50 executive actions, 22 of which were effective reversals of Donald Trump’s policies. Covid-19 and immigration received 15 and 11 executive orders . This number was the highest for any single issue. It is as it has been said; Trumps trade restrictions received little attention from the White House. Though the data on the charts above demonstrate that the U.S. lost by this narrow measure of victory and defeat, the new administration has not been quick to remove the trade barriers imposed by the Trump administration. Some analysts attribute the delay to the political economy surrounding steel and aluminum production.
Policy Creep
Policies can generate a constituency. Politicians can find themselves locked in a relationship with these constituencies. This phenomenon bestows public policy with a sticky quality. If a politician desires to reverse a policy, they must contend with the constituents that have been benefitting from the given policy. In this particular case, to the degree that they have benefitted from Trumps steel tariffs, American steel manufacturers, the steel unions and local and state municipalities will have to feel the ‘pain’ of a reversal of these policies. From a different point of view, to reverse Trumps trade tariffs, the Biden administration must risk the ire of these constituencies. Finally, the public need not be the only source of policy stickiness. The state itself can have a significant interest in a specific policy. It is possible for a state to fail to overcome the inertia to reverse a policy because it stands in its own way. Tax rates offer a case in point. Should a state lack the discipline to control the growth in its expenditures, tax rates may creep upwards in pursuit of the revenues required to maintain higher expenditures and budget deficits. When a 1913 constitutional amendment did away with a supreme court repudiation against the constitutionality of income taxes in the United States, a progressive income tax regime became law . This regime saw taxes rise from 7% to 24%, and then 63% under the Hoover administration, on to 90% under Franklin Delano Roosevelt – a wartime president. FDR himself desired a tax rate of 99.1%; an idea that did not fly through Congress halls. Today, U.S. income tax rate is 39.6%. Though the U.S. founding fathers preferred the freedom offered by consumption taxes, their dream remains just that.
Kenyan tax rates were dropped in March 2020 at the onset of Covid-19. This helped households absorb the Covid-19 shock. By 2021, these tax rates returned to their previous level. This seems to imply an unwillingness to lose these revenues or an inability to afford to maintain this policy. The Kenyan Revenue Authority motto proclaims that taxes are a bastion of Kenyan sovereignty. Public sector indebtedness and the tax rates that follow them seem to imply that this sovereignty must be paid for by an increasing share of the fruits of the average citizen. Though the price of sovereignty is growing, it is not clear that the state is purchasing greater levels of sovereignty than were enjoyed previously. Sometimes the state finds it difficult to maintain a policy that is good for the welfare of the public because of faults of its own devising.
Comparative Advantage and Supply Chain Complexity
Comparative advantage explains that nations specialize and trade because self-sufficiency leads to lower production and consumption and consequently less welfare. In the chart above, the production capabilities of two nations, A and B, are illustrated. The two nations consume cars and trucks. country B has an absolute advantage because it can produce both cars and trucks in greater quantities than country A. If both countries refuse to trade, Country A would produce and consume 3 trucks and 15 cars whereas country B would produce and consume 12 trucks and 15 cars all for a total of 45 units. Because country B is less efficient at car production than country A, Country B incurs a higher opportunity cost in car production than country A. In a trading scenario, therefore, country B will produce trucks – its specialization – and country A will produce cars. Were the two countries to specialize and trade, they would produce and consume 51 units in total.
The complexity of supply chains illustrates why problems can arise when they experience a sudden shock. Covid-19 and the countermeasures it has demanded – many of which included restrictions to the free movement of goods, services, and the factors of capital – are just such a kind of shock. The complexity of these chains may also explain the difficulty inherent in trying to prescribe fixes to the supply chain. It also explains why many of the problems supply chain problems will be fixed at the firm level. The state may be limited in its ability to respond.
Comparative advantage applies in the competition between countries and the competition between firms. It is more efficient for the flower farmer to focus on farming and to trade for logistics with firms that own and or operate fleets of jet planes or merchant ships.
The farmer and the factory owner may own some trucks to transport goods to the port, but they are unlikely to own shipping containers. If they own shipping containers, they are unlikely to own container ships. If they own container ships, it is highly unlikely that they own a fleet of container ships.
For the sake of simplicity, we will assume that the exporters prefer the Chinese Eicher Pro trucks and that their choice of container and container ship are the 40-foot-high cube and the geared 500-TEU capacity container ship. The truck may cost anywhere between $25,000 and $35,000. The container goes for an average of $2,000. The ship goes for $10 million, brand new.
The principle of economies of scale explains why an exporter would not own and operate all these elements of the supply chain. A container is filled to optimum capacity relative to the cost of purchase and operation. We imagine that the price paid to transport the container includes the price paid to rent space on a ship, loading and off-loading and other costs.
After buying the container, the owner must fill the container with orders going to the same destination. Doing this efficiently and repeatedly is costly. Tracking all these orders is costly. The effort required to fill the container up for a return trip compounds the problem. Overall, catering to and managing a robust network of clients from different ports, speaking different languages, subject to different economic and exchange rate conditions is no mean feat.
Were the exporter to purchase a container ship, too, the same problems compound further. Attempting to control the supply chain is fraught with difficulty.
Supply Chain Complexity in the Real World
Using the market for medical goods as an exemplar, the chart above illustrates the pervasiveness of international trade in daily life. The trade in the market for medical goods is not dominated by one single producing firm or national economy. With 50.4% share of the market, China dominates the global face mask trade. China’s dominance is also apparent in the market for paper bed sheets, non-woven protective garments and protective spectacles. But as the image illustrates, China alone does not make all the medical goods it may need. Importantly, the comparative advantages can be gleaned from this chart. Nations like the United States, Germany and Japan are important manufacturers of intubation kits, patient monitoring devices and masks with mechanical parts. Textile face masks, paper bed sheets and non-woven protective garments are less complex to manufacture than intubation kits, patient monitoring devices and masks with mechanical parts. The former set of goods requires less knowledge to produce than the latter. China’s comparative advantage in low wage labor is apparent from this illustration. The enterprise of low complexity goods production will exact higher opportunity costs on the United States, Germany and Japan. This is simply another way of saying that these nations cannot afford to compete on labor costs with China. By specializing in the good in which they have a comparative advantage and then trading these goods for other goods, the United States, Germany, China, Japan and other nations around the world benefit. Keeping a man alive, today, is a global effort. Wealthy and much less wealthy countries make important contributions.
It is important to note that this chart was made in 2018. Three years ago, no single institution, public or private, could have predicted that the year 2020 would bring with it a global pandemic. I illustrated the efforts by the World Health Organization to prepare United Nations member states for cross border international emergencies. Efforts by the Obama administration to prepare the United States for a global pandemic are on record . Efforts by the Trump administration that undid some of the preparedness have also been documented. Any public health institution worth its salt is aware of the possibilities of trans national infectious diseases. Raising tax revenues and channeling them towards the purchase of goods and services required to research, prepare for and institute pandemic countermeasures is in itself a difficult task. But these same public institutions did not produce all the goods and machines that hospitals needed to contend with Covid-19. Under operation ‘Warp Speed’, the U.S. government ordered a surge in the production of ventilators . They did not organize the companies like Ford and General Motors, that produced the ventilators. Furthermore, these companies did the hard work of restructuring their supply chains to meet this abrupt change in the demand for inputs that the surge implied. This work was not done by the U.S. government. Importantly, it could not have been.
Conclusion
The consumer enjoys the benefits and complexities of international trade. These benefits include higher disposable income and improved standards of living. Economic complexities emerge without the direction of any central command. Entrepreneurs build businesses and supply chains that solve highly sophisticated problems. The result is improved consumer and producer surplus. That simply means higher profits for producers and a higher quality of life. Firms and whole economies benefit from adhering to comparative advantage principles and specializing while trading for those goods in which they have no comparative advantage. This fact is brought into higher relief by the Covid-19 crisis.
The policymaker that believes they can have command over market minutiae and prepare for every kind of future risk is engaged in pretensions of omniscience. Such a perspective can lead to public waste. It is more beneficial to create the conditions under which economic complexity can thrive. When crises do emerge, a wealthy, complex domestic and global economy is better placed to allocate resources and respond. Finally, in this reallocation process, the markets should be allowed a degree of trust. Importantly, some nations cannot afford to build strategic reserves in, say, ventilators. Because a state cannot prepare for every single eventuality, a strategic reserve might be, in some cases, a byword for waste.
Additionally, policies can and do generate public and private sector constituencies. These constituencies can become entrenched to the detriment of consumer and producer welfare. In international trade, this entrenchment can serve to remove the degree of healthy competition that drives growth in economic complexity.
Finally, in the prototypical science respecting state of the day, policy makers could not have commanded the economy to produce every single solution in response to COVID19. Prior to COVID19 and the policy makers re-calibration of the public health posture, the entrepreneur had solved many of the problems. The policy maker and the greater public continue to benefit from the latent potential offered by the global market for medical goods. Economic complexity is as a spring from which households, firms and governments may draw strength in times of crisis.
In these modern days, treating a patient is a global effort. Navigating these pandemic ridden times will also be a global effort. National self sufficiency is a futile policy when both wealthy and less wealthy countries make such important contributions to the medical welfare of patients around the world. Beyond the medical field, our lives are better today because of specialization and global trade. On the one hand, efforts to conceptualize and institute policies that benefit the growth of industry are merited. On the other hand, we have illustrated that efforts to command the economy in a specific direction and or promote self-sufficiency wasteful at best.
References
Case Adjournments is one of the key issues that contributes to case backlogs because it reduces the efficiency of courts. An adjournment in a legal setting involves pausing or temporally stopping ongoing proceedings to be continued at a later time, date, or location. It may also indicate the end of the day’s proceedings. Parties involved […]
Introduction In February 2023, the Kenyan government announced its intention to establish a framework that will enable Savings and Credit Cooperative Societies (SACCOs) to extend loans to each other. This inter-Sacco lending framework shall be set up by the Sacco Societies Regulatory Authority (SASRA) and was anticipated to be in effect from August 2023. This […]
While Kenya has long implemented the NHIF (National Hospital Insurance Fund) whose core mandate is to provide medical insurance coverage to all its members and their declared dependants and also to make medical care affordable, enrolment rates, particularly in the voluntary and informal sectors, remain low. Yet, NHIF is the most common type of health […]
Introduction According to the United Nations, Double Taxation Agreements (DTAs) are “bilateral agreements between two countries which allocate taxing rights over income between those two countries thereby preventing double taxation of income. The main objective of DTAs therefore, is to prevent and or eliminate avoidance and evasion of taxes on income and capital by both […]
Courts as Monopolies Access to justice is fundamental in any democratic society, ensuring individuals can pursue their legal rights and seek redress for grievances. However, when courts operate as monopolies, it can have implications for access to justice. Monopolies have exclusive control or dominance over a particular market or industry. Courts are monopolies because they […]
Post date: Wed, Mar 17, 2021 |
Category: General |
By: Emmanuel Wa-Kyendo, |
International trade concerns the movement of the factors of production, changes in their ownership and the movement in and goods and services. In classical economics, the factors of production are land, labor, and capital. Land cannot move but its ownership and its use can change. Labor and capital can move across borders. Goods and some services can also move across borders. In this blog, I argue that the discovery of efficient means to allocate goods, services, and the factors of production across the world is a complex process. It cannot be centrally planned. Furthermore, economic complexity is a veritable form of crisis preparedness. International trade serves to enhance that preparedness.
I use the example of the recent US-China trade war and the Covid-19 pandemic to illustrate that the principle of comparative advantage endures in its veracity. We are better off when we specialize and trade.
The charts above offer a month by month breakdown in the evolution of China’s trade balance with the United States, Chinese exports to that country and Chinese imports from that country. In December 2017, China’s trade surplus with the U.S. was $25.6 billion. By 2020, the surplus had widened to $31.4 billion. Chinese exports to the U.S. grew while imports from the U.S. shrank. In 2018, Trump launched a trade war against China. The objectives of this trade war were to reduce the value of Chinese exports to the U.S. and reduce the U.S. trade deficit with China. These graphs illustrate that, on both accounts, the trade war did not meet its objective. Instead, the opposite occurred . The value of Chinese exports to the U.S. increased. China’s trade surplus with the U.S. grew. Additionally, a 2019 study by Moody’s analytics estimated that the trade war exacted a cost of 300,000 jobs and 0.3% of real GDP to the U.S. economy. The cost of the trade war was also felt by U.S. companies. U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports cost that group $US 1.7 trillion in stock prices . The latest reports reveal that the Biden administration is undertaking a review of the trade restrictions put in place by the Trump administration.
An observer might question the slow, apparently deliberate effort by the Biden administration to review the trade restrictions in question. This response by the Biden administration is in stark contrast to the furious pace of executive orders, actions and memorandums on other issues. By March 8, 2021, President Joe Biden had signed an excess of 50 executive actions, 22 of which were effective reversals of Donald Trump’s policies. Covid-19 and immigration received 15 and 11 executive orders . This number was the highest for any single issue. It is as it has been said; Trumps trade restrictions received little attention from the White House. Though the data on the charts above demonstrate that the U.S. lost by this narrow measure of victory and defeat, the new administration has not been quick to remove the trade barriers imposed by the Trump administration. Some analysts attribute the delay to the political economy surrounding steel and aluminum production.
Policy Creep
Policies can generate a constituency. Politicians can find themselves locked in a relationship with these constituencies. This phenomenon bestows public policy with a sticky quality. If a politician desires to reverse a policy, they must contend with the constituents that have been benefitting from the given policy. In this particular case, to the degree that they have benefitted from Trumps steel tariffs, American steel manufacturers, the steel unions and local and state municipalities will have to feel the ‘pain’ of a reversal of these policies. From a different point of view, to reverse Trumps trade tariffs, the Biden administration must risk the ire of these constituencies. Finally, the public need not be the only source of policy stickiness. The state itself can have a significant interest in a specific policy. It is possible for a state to fail to overcome the inertia to reverse a policy because it stands in its own way. Tax rates offer a case in point. Should a state lack the discipline to control the growth in its expenditures, tax rates may creep upwards in pursuit of the revenues required to maintain higher expenditures and budget deficits. When a 1913 constitutional amendment did away with a supreme court repudiation against the constitutionality of income taxes in the United States, a progressive income tax regime became law . This regime saw taxes rise from 7% to 24%, and then 63% under the Hoover administration, on to 90% under Franklin Delano Roosevelt – a wartime president. FDR himself desired a tax rate of 99.1%; an idea that did not fly through Congress halls. Today, U.S. income tax rate is 39.6%. Though the U.S. founding fathers preferred the freedom offered by consumption taxes, their dream remains just that.
Kenyan tax rates were dropped in March 2020 at the onset of Covid-19. This helped households absorb the Covid-19 shock. By 2021, these tax rates returned to their previous level. This seems to imply an unwillingness to lose these revenues or an inability to afford to maintain this policy. The Kenyan Revenue Authority motto proclaims that taxes are a bastion of Kenyan sovereignty. Public sector indebtedness and the tax rates that follow them seem to imply that this sovereignty must be paid for by an increasing share of the fruits of the average citizen. Though the price of sovereignty is growing, it is not clear that the state is purchasing greater levels of sovereignty than were enjoyed previously. Sometimes the state finds it difficult to maintain a policy that is good for the welfare of the public because of faults of its own devising.
Comparative Advantage and Supply Chain Complexity
Comparative advantage explains that nations specialize and trade because self-sufficiency leads to lower production and consumption and consequently less welfare. In the chart above, the production capabilities of two nations, A and B, are illustrated. The two nations consume cars and trucks. country B has an absolute advantage because it can produce both cars and trucks in greater quantities than country A. If both countries refuse to trade, Country A would produce and consume 3 trucks and 15 cars whereas country B would produce and consume 12 trucks and 15 cars all for a total of 45 units. Because country B is less efficient at car production than country A, Country B incurs a higher opportunity cost in car production than country A. In a trading scenario, therefore, country B will produce trucks – its specialization – and country A will produce cars. Were the two countries to specialize and trade, they would produce and consume 51 units in total.
The complexity of supply chains illustrates why problems can arise when they experience a sudden shock. Covid-19 and the countermeasures it has demanded – many of which included restrictions to the free movement of goods, services, and the factors of capital – are just such a kind of shock. The complexity of these chains may also explain the difficulty inherent in trying to prescribe fixes to the supply chain. It also explains why many of the problems supply chain problems will be fixed at the firm level. The state may be limited in its ability to respond.
Comparative advantage applies in the competition between countries and the competition between firms. It is more efficient for the flower farmer to focus on farming and to trade for logistics with firms that own and or operate fleets of jet planes or merchant ships.
The farmer and the factory owner may own some trucks to transport goods to the port, but they are unlikely to own shipping containers. If they own shipping containers, they are unlikely to own container ships. If they own container ships, it is highly unlikely that they own a fleet of container ships.
For the sake of simplicity, we will assume that the exporters prefer the Chinese Eicher Pro trucks and that their choice of container and container ship are the 40-foot-high cube and the geared 500-TEU capacity container ship. The truck may cost anywhere between $25,000 and $35,000. The container goes for an average of $2,000. The ship goes for $10 million, brand new.
The principle of economies of scale explains why an exporter would not own and operate all these elements of the supply chain. A container is filled to optimum capacity relative to the cost of purchase and operation. We imagine that the price paid to transport the container includes the price paid to rent space on a ship, loading and off-loading and other costs.
After buying the container, the owner must fill the container with orders going to the same destination. Doing this efficiently and repeatedly is costly. Tracking all these orders is costly. The effort required to fill the container up for a return trip compounds the problem. Overall, catering to and managing a robust network of clients from different ports, speaking different languages, subject to different economic and exchange rate conditions is no mean feat.
Were the exporter to purchase a container ship, too, the same problems compound further. Attempting to control the supply chain is fraught with difficulty.
Supply Chain Complexity in the Real World
Using the market for medical goods as an exemplar, the chart above illustrates the pervasiveness of international trade in daily life. The trade in the market for medical goods is not dominated by one single producing firm or national economy. With 50.4% share of the market, China dominates the global face mask trade. China’s dominance is also apparent in the market for paper bed sheets, non-woven protective garments and protective spectacles. But as the image illustrates, China alone does not make all the medical goods it may need. Importantly, the comparative advantages can be gleaned from this chart. Nations like the United States, Germany and Japan are important manufacturers of intubation kits, patient monitoring devices and masks with mechanical parts. Textile face masks, paper bed sheets and non-woven protective garments are less complex to manufacture than intubation kits, patient monitoring devices and masks with mechanical parts. The former set of goods requires less knowledge to produce than the latter. China’s comparative advantage in low wage labor is apparent from this illustration. The enterprise of low complexity goods production will exact higher opportunity costs on the United States, Germany and Japan. This is simply another way of saying that these nations cannot afford to compete on labor costs with China. By specializing in the good in which they have a comparative advantage and then trading these goods for other goods, the United States, Germany, China, Japan and other nations around the world benefit. Keeping a man alive, today, is a global effort. Wealthy and much less wealthy countries make important contributions.
It is important to note that this chart was made in 2018. Three years ago, no single institution, public or private, could have predicted that the year 2020 would bring with it a global pandemic. I illustrated the efforts by the World Health Organization to prepare United Nations member states for cross border international emergencies. Efforts by the Obama administration to prepare the United States for a global pandemic are on record . Efforts by the Trump administration that undid some of the preparedness have also been documented. Any public health institution worth its salt is aware of the possibilities of trans national infectious diseases. Raising tax revenues and channeling them towards the purchase of goods and services required to research, prepare for and institute pandemic countermeasures is in itself a difficult task. But these same public institutions did not produce all the goods and machines that hospitals needed to contend with Covid-19. Under operation ‘Warp Speed’, the U.S. government ordered a surge in the production of ventilators . They did not organize the companies like Ford and General Motors, that produced the ventilators. Furthermore, these companies did the hard work of restructuring their supply chains to meet this abrupt change in the demand for inputs that the surge implied. This work was not done by the U.S. government. Importantly, it could not have been.
Conclusion
The consumer enjoys the benefits and complexities of international trade. These benefits include higher disposable income and improved standards of living. Economic complexities emerge without the direction of any central command. Entrepreneurs build businesses and supply chains that solve highly sophisticated problems. The result is improved consumer and producer surplus. That simply means higher profits for producers and a higher quality of life. Firms and whole economies benefit from adhering to comparative advantage principles and specializing while trading for those goods in which they have no comparative advantage. This fact is brought into higher relief by the Covid-19 crisis.
The policymaker that believes they can have command over market minutiae and prepare for every kind of future risk is engaged in pretensions of omniscience. Such a perspective can lead to public waste. It is more beneficial to create the conditions under which economic complexity can thrive. When crises do emerge, a wealthy, complex domestic and global economy is better placed to allocate resources and respond. Finally, in this reallocation process, the markets should be allowed a degree of trust. Importantly, some nations cannot afford to build strategic reserves in, say, ventilators. Because a state cannot prepare for every single eventuality, a strategic reserve might be, in some cases, a byword for waste.
Additionally, policies can and do generate public and private sector constituencies. These constituencies can become entrenched to the detriment of consumer and producer welfare. In international trade, this entrenchment can serve to remove the degree of healthy competition that drives growth in economic complexity.
Finally, in the prototypical science respecting state of the day, policy makers could not have commanded the economy to produce every single solution in response to COVID19. Prior to COVID19 and the policy makers re-calibration of the public health posture, the entrepreneur had solved many of the problems. The policy maker and the greater public continue to benefit from the latent potential offered by the global market for medical goods. Economic complexity is as a spring from which households, firms and governments may draw strength in times of crisis.
In these modern days, treating a patient is a global effort. Navigating these pandemic ridden times will also be a global effort. National self sufficiency is a futile policy when both wealthy and less wealthy countries make such important contributions to the medical welfare of patients around the world. Beyond the medical field, our lives are better today because of specialization and global trade. On the one hand, efforts to conceptualize and institute policies that benefit the growth of industry are merited. On the other hand, we have illustrated that efforts to command the economy in a specific direction and or promote self-sufficiency wasteful at best.
References
Case Adjournments is one of the key issues that contributes to case backlogs because it reduces the efficiency of courts. An adjournment in a legal setting involves pausing or temporally stopping ongoing proceedings to be continued at a later time, date, or location. It may also indicate the end of the day’s proceedings. Parties involved […]
Introduction In February 2023, the Kenyan government announced its intention to establish a framework that will enable Savings and Credit Cooperative Societies (SACCOs) to extend loans to each other. This inter-Sacco lending framework shall be set up by the Sacco Societies Regulatory Authority (SASRA) and was anticipated to be in effect from August 2023. This […]
While Kenya has long implemented the NHIF (National Hospital Insurance Fund) whose core mandate is to provide medical insurance coverage to all its members and their declared dependants and also to make medical care affordable, enrolment rates, particularly in the voluntary and informal sectors, remain low. Yet, NHIF is the most common type of health […]
Introduction According to the United Nations, Double Taxation Agreements (DTAs) are “bilateral agreements between two countries which allocate taxing rights over income between those two countries thereby preventing double taxation of income. The main objective of DTAs therefore, is to prevent and or eliminate avoidance and evasion of taxes on income and capital by both […]
Courts as Monopolies Access to justice is fundamental in any democratic society, ensuring individuals can pursue their legal rights and seek redress for grievances. However, when courts operate as monopolies, it can have implications for access to justice. Monopolies have exclusive control or dominance over a particular market or industry. Courts are monopolies because they […]