My university is having a writing contest within our business department (where our econ dept. is), and the topic is international economics. There are cash prizes for winning papers, but for me this feels more like an opportunity to expose my professors to Austrian economics. There are a couple Austro-libertarians up here, so I will have plenty of help doing research, I just need some topic ideas.
The length is 5-15 pages double spaced. I’d like to find a topic that’s of interest to the professors, and will give them some exposure to Austrian economic analysis. What sub-topics within international economics would you suggest? Is there any way I could find a reason to talk about ABCT without straying from the theme of intl. econ?
Why not something related to trade deficits? If you could make a persuasive case on why private trade deficits do not translate into debt and do not cause instability, I think you might even be a contestant to win the contest. This is a fallacy which is used even by the most learned of academic scholars, and so a persuasive case against such a fallacy would be powerful.
The aforementioned suggestion I think is fantastic. Another is to talk about “free trade” agreements, and how they are actually restricted trade agreements that hearken back to mercantilism and protectionism.
Talk about the inherent instability of monetary nationalism and floating exchange rates. Mises and Hayek have a lot to say about this. Our international monetary system has no self-correcting mechanisms except for currency crises (which is becoming more and more frequent); it’s becoming blatantly obvious, to everyone, that we need drastic reform. This is something Austrians aren’t talking about, and they need to, before Keynes’ Bancor becomes reality.
If it were me, I would defend Peter Schiff’s thesis that China will lift it’s currency peg, stop lending to the U.S., and as a result, consumer goods prices will rise in the U.S., and fall in China. This topic allows a direct comparison of two countries, one with an inflationary credit expansion, and the other without.
I like what Stephen said. The first thing that came to mind was to write about the post 1971 monetary standard with the dollar as reserve currency. As Peter Schiff has talked about, you can write about how the U.S. government exports inflation while importing real goods and services from abroad. You can tie this into the Middle East world and oil, or how NAFTA regulations have shifted the global economy. Or you can talk about how a worldwide central bank would export inflation everyone and equally across all economies, as I think Keynes once said would be advantageous.[+o(]