TTIP: Beware the treaty's empty economic promises
Found on New Scientist on Sunday, 02 November 2014
Karel De Gucht, the outgoing EU trade commissioner, described it as "the cheapest stimulus package you can imagine". To UK prime minister David Cameron it is a "once-in-a-generation prize".
CGE is a form of mainstream economic modelling that assumes all markets are perfectly competitive, efficient and in equilibrium. Or, in lay terms, that there is a buyer for every product or service, including labour. Not only is this a poor approximation of reality, but CGE models are notoriously open to bias.
The models do include estimates of "job displacement" – ranging from 400,000 to 1.1 million in the EU – but they also assume that these workers will be seamlessly reallocated to new jobs by the market.
Not to forget that no supporter wants to really talk about the secret courts, or if, downplays them as unimportant. Reality however shows that such corporate courts will be used a lot to pull money out of the nations. If TTIP was really that awesome, negotiations would happen in front of the public and documents would not be secret.