Trade Clearly Matters

Every increase of $1 billion in U.S. exports is estimated to support 6,000 jobs, and 95 percent of the world’s consumers live outside the United States, says Miriam Sapiro in her new report, “Why Trade Matters.” It clearly matters, as she explains in this wide-ranging interview about the importance of trade, how trade negotiations work, why trade leads to net job gains, the prospects for ongoing trade negotiations with European and Asia-Pacific countries, and more. Sapiro, a visiting fellow in Global Economy and Development at Brookings, was deputy U.S. trade representative from 2009 to 2014, and also served on the National Security Council and at the U.S. State Department. Plus, in a recent event on the future of civilian robotics, moderator Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow and editor-in-chief of Lawfare (and also the first guest on the Brookings Cafeteria), described the background of a flight experiment he and colleagues did with off-the-shelf drones, one that the FAA said could not take place in Washington, DC. Learn more about it on Lawfare. And finally, in a new "What’s Happening in Congress" segment, Fellow John Hudak offers his views of how both Congress and President Obama dealt with the administration’s decision to take military action against ISIS targets in Syria and Iraq. Show Notes: • Why Trade Matters (paper by Miriam Sapiro)• Export Nation 2013 (data and interactive from the Metropolitan Policy Program)• The Trans-Pacific Partnership and Asia-Pacific Integration: A Quantitative Assessment (the Peterson Institute report)• Steven Pifer's podcast• The Lawfare Drone Smackdown• The Future of Civilian Robotics (event)• FixGov blog Send feedback and questions for podcast guests to [email protected].