Foreign Trade Zones Research Articles

The Foreign-Trade Zone and its Impacts on Neighboring Communities in Mobile, Alabama

abstract: The foreign-trade zone (FTZ) has become an essential part of national trade policy in the United States and an important aspect of promoting local development. Officially opened in its current form in 1983 under the official title of FTZ No. 82, the foreign-trade zone in Mobile, Alabama has become an integral part of the local economy and an important tool used by local councils for attracting overseas firms. Located primarily along the west banks of the Mobile Bay and Mobile River, with several sites dispersed throughout Mobile and Baldwin counties, the zone has been used as a catalyst for regional economic growth policy. The purpose of this study is to analyze the external costs and benefits to the local community using observational data and interviews with local authorities familiar with the zone. Qualitative findings indicate the zone has been a major source of foreign direct investment for Mobile and contributes to local economic development by attracting major transnational firms to the city. However, observations and interviews suggest the zone has primarily benefited large firms at the expense of smaller firms, provided little spillover into neighboring boroughs, and adversely affected the local environment and public health.

The Impact of Foreign-Trade Zones on County Level Development: A Temporal Analysis

In 1934, the Foreign-Trade Zone Act was passed in order to ease restrictions on internationally traded goods, provide domestic firms with a competitive advantage over foreign companies, boost jobs in import/export businesses, increase exports, and promote economic development. The growth in the number of foreign-trade zones (FTZs) across the United States since 1934 has resulted in the ever-expanding reach of the zone program across the landscape. Even with the growth of FTZs, these zones have remained largely obscure to academia and the public at-large. While various scholars have analyzed the impact of FTZs on exports and trade volumes, few have focused on spatial and temporal impacts on neighboring communities. This study analyzed short- and long-term percentage changes in median household income, unemployment rates, number of manufacturing firms, and manufacturing employment after FTZs were added to a county. Results indicate a significant long-term increase in manufacturing employment in counties adding an FTZ but a significant increase in unemployment rates and decline in manufacturing firms in neighboring counties. These findings suggest FTZs may provide manufacturing employment benefits for a county in the long-term but costs on overall employment and number of firms in neighboring counties may outweigh these benefits.

Tax Regimes in the USA: The Review and the Effect on Small Businesses

Subject. The article discusses the development of small businesses in the USA though supporting measures. Objectives. We suggest how small businesses should be supported and developed by analyzing the relevant practices in the USA. We also identify and analyze factors and conditions that contribute to the development of small businesses through supportive measures taken in the USA. Methods. We use the methods of analysis, synthesis and logic research through the creative data approach. Results. In this article we analyze the specifics of tax treatment of business and small business, first of all, in Foreign Trade Zones and in the USA as a whole. We reveal special tax regimes in the USA, referring to the business environment of SME in Russia just for the sake of comparison. Having analyzed relevant positive practices in the USA, we suggest how small businesses should be supported and developed in Russia, which is the novelty of this study. Conclusions and Relevance. We conclude that the apparatus the USA uses to bring its small business sector to the international market and expand its operations, helps businessmen increase their profit and sales, get more free from seasonal fluctuations and turbulence in the domestic market and receive real financial aid. Supporting the small business, the State should prioritize ensuring sufficient jobs for the people, including the creation of additional ones.

Out of Stock: The Warehouse in the History of Capitalism

Out of Stock charts the history of the warehouse as a “spatial form” in the United States from the colonial era to 1989 (20). Although not quite the book that its title promises, it is full of interesting insights that will reward patient readers: Perth Amboy, New Jersey, was a major slave mart in the eighteenth century; the New York Crystal Palace of 1852 was a bonded warehouse for foreign importers; and Chicago is by some estimates the third-largest container port on the planet, after Hong Kong and Singapore. Skeptical of the oft-voiced warehousemen’s boast that warehousing is one of the “’oldest businesses in the world,’” Orenstein contends that not until the 1850s did the warehouse emerge as a “stand-alone business,” and not until after the Civil War did it become a “destination” on the “cognitive maps of city denizens” (31). Originally depositories for goods, warehouses are today depots for their transportation and processing. Use gave way to exchange and storage to circulation. Landmarks in this transformation included the Warehouse Act of 1846, which permitted importers to delay the payment of tariff duties, and the legislation establishing the first foreign trade zones in 1934. Among the sources that Orenstein mined are the trade press, government documents, and the papers of Brooklyn Congressman Emanuel Celler.Out of Stock has the word warehouse in its title, but it is primarily a history of the foreign trade zone, a spatially delimited territory that in recent decades has become increasingly central to the manufacture of foreign goods destined for the U. S. market. The international dimension of the warehouse is important to Orenstein, since it enables her to align her project with the globalizing impulse of historians of capitalism, and to disparage as parochial the bottom-up regionalism of business historians such as that of, for example, Philip Scranton in his Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865–1925 (Princeton, 1997).For Orenstein, as for historians of capitalism, capitalism is a monster abstraction that no individual, group, or institution can check. Question-begging and attention-getting pronouncements abound: “Only by showing the mismatch between fantasy and reality can we expose the counterfeit freedom that sustains the tyranny of capitalism” (25); “customs territory…constituted the very foundation of modern nation states” (107); “the foreign-trade zone repackaged warehousing into a dreamscape of frictionless transactionality” (181).Orenstein is right to observe that foreign-trade foreign trade zones challenge conventional assumptions about national sovereignty, labor standards, and supply chains. Yet while their establishment is the “epitome of politics” (10), we never get more than a glimpse of how the sausage is made. Her principal protagonists are “warehousemen” and “zone operators,” one-dimensional stick figures, almost none of whom is identified by name. Some subjects are more difficult to explicate than others. Nonetheless, in contrast to books on related themes—for example, Marc Levinson’s The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton, 2016; orig. pub. 2006); Shane Hamilton’s Trucking Country: The Road to America's Wal-Mart Economy (Princeton, 2008), and Pietra Rivola’s The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade (Hoboken, 2014; orig. pub. 2005)—Out of Stock is not written in a style that is likely to lead to widespread classroom adoption. Pitched at colleagues in American studies and related fields, it offers relatively little to business, economic, or political historians. Even so, it is sufficiently suggestive in its assemblage of relevant detail that it might just become a cult classic among those academics who conflate cultural critique with interdisciplinarity.Certain issues receive attention; others do not. Orenstein duly notes the populist enthusiasm for government-backed storage facilities, but she provides no index entry for Munn vs. Illinois, even though the Supreme Court’s affirmation of state warehouse regulation remains the single best-known warehouse-related event in American history. The rise of the self-storage business since the 1960s also falls outside of the author’s ambit, as does cold storage, public granaries, and the off-site repositories maintained by libraries and art museums. Warehouse aesthetics is another neglected topic worth exploring. The warehouse, in short, has yet to find its historian. Even so, it is a tribute to Orenstein’s patient and imaginative sleuthing that these and other subjects can now come more clearly into view.

Special Economic Zones and Free Trade Enclaves: A Troubled Existence After India: Export Related Measures (Panel) Ruling?

Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and Free Trade Zones (FTZs) are special trade or manufacturing enclaves within the territory of a State governed by a different set of laws and regulations than the rest of its territory. They form an essential part of the economic development, trade, and investment policy of several developed countries as well as emerging economies. In 2018, the United States challenged, among other measures, certain incentives which India had provided to SEZs, Export Oriented Units, Biotechnology and Electronics and Hardware Parks (EOU/EHTP/BTP) under India’s Foreign Trade Policy. These incentives were challenged as prohibited export subsidies under the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (SCM Agreement). While the Panel found against India, some of the issues adjudicated in the Panel report have implications for SEZs, FTZs and other similar entities located in such special enclaves. This article seeks to examine some of the key implications of this dispute on the functioning of deemed foreign trade zones within the territorial bounds of a WTO member. Of particular focus is, how WTO Members can implement the SEZs or other Trade Zones without inviting adverse outcomes. In addition, the article examines the contentious issue of the operation of the phase-out period for export subsidies under Article 27.2 of the SCM Agreement, which is of particular importance to a number of developing countries. Special Economic Zones, WTO, SCM Agreement, United States, India, fiscal incentives, revenue foregone, Footnote 1, Article 27, Annex VII, developing countries, cross-border zones

Ambiguous jurisdictions: navigating U.S. Foreign-Trade Zones as extraterritorial spaces

ABSTRACT This article explores the potential for exploitation of jurisdictional ambiguity presented by Foreign-Trade Zones (FTZs) in the United States as extraterritorial spaces within national territory. Nearly half a million people work in hundreds of U.S. FTZs. Transnational corporations are increasingly, with states’ assistance, operating in rural FTZs and asserting extrajudicial authority to create totalising environments of power and labour relations within the zones. Ethnographic examples are provided from research on how variously situated interviewees make sense of the web of local, state, national and international jurisdictions they navigate daily in FTZs in Kentucky and South Carolina. Fear, silencing and contingency are among the technologies of control workers experience in FTZs along with the daily physical disciplining of bodies leaving U.S. territory while still on U.S. soil. FTZs illustrate the extent to which U.S. economic activity is global, contradicting the economic nationalist and isolationist rhetoric of the recent Trump administration. That contradiction is foregrounded for workers in rural factories utilising Foreign-Trade Zones, who may be uncertain of the applicability of U.S. legal protections in the workplace.

U.S. taxation: The description and impact on small businesses

Subject. The article discusses the development of small businesses in the USA though supporting measures. Objectives. We suggest how small businesses should be supported and developed by analyzing the relevant practices in the USA. We also identify and analyze factors and conditions that contribute to the development of small businesses through supportive measures taken in the USA. Methods. We use the methods of analysis, synthesis and logic research through the creative data approach. Results. In this article we analyze the specifics of tax treatment of business and small business, first of all, in Foreign Trade Zones and in the USA as a whole. We reveal special tax regimes in the USA, referring to the business environment of SME in Russia just for the sake of comparison. Having analyzed relevant positive practices in the USA, we suggest how small businesses should be supported and developed in Russia, which is the novelty of this study. Conclusions and Relevance. We conclude that the he apparatus the USA uses to bring its small business sector to the international market and expand its operations, helps businessmen increase their profit and sales, get more free from seasonal fluctuations and turbulence in the domestic market and receive real financial aid. Supporting the small business, the State should prioritize ensuring sufficient jobs for the people, including the creation of additional ones.

Study on Improvement and Risk Assessment of Marine Logistics Finance Development Model Based on the Background of Free Trade Zone Construction

Fu, Z. and Wang, J., 2020. Study on improvement and risk assessment of marine logistics finance development model based on the background of free trade zone construction. In: Liu, X. and Zhao, L. (eds.), Today's Modern Coastal Society: Technical and Sociological Aspects of Coastal Research. Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 111, pp. 222–225. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208.The free trade area has a more important impact on the marine logistics industry, promoting the country's re-export trade, offshore trade, offshore finance, and shipping services. Through the determination of maritime logistics enterprises, this paper provides a method for the determination of the comprehensive risk value of logistics financial business. Through the establishment of the risk evaluation model by the wavelet support vector regression algorithm, from the development of the comprehensive value-at-risk business, the paper summarizes the concepts, practice forms, development process, and important relations of the relevant trade and shipping logistics industry and the foreign free trade zone.

Foreign-Trade Zones in the Southeastern United States: Do They Promote Economic Development or Lead to Spatial Inequality?

Foreign-Trade Zones in the Southeastern United States: Do They Promote Economic Development or Lead to Spatial Inequality?

Learning from the Experience of the Construction of Foreign Free Trade Zone Investment Liberalization and Facilitation

This paper aims to analyze the advanced experience obtained from the foreign pilot free trade zone, so as to provide references for the construction of the investment liberalization and facilitation in Chongqing Pilot Free Trade Zone to serve for it better.

Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America by Mark Padoongpatt

Reviewed by: Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America by Mark Padoongpatt Natalie Santizo (bio) Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America, by Mark Padoongpatt. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. Xi + 249 pp. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 978-0-520-29374-8. Flavors of Empire explores Thai American identity and community formation through analyzing the rise of Thai food in Los Angeles. Padoongpatt directly addresses a critical issue within Asian/Pacific Islander studies: the constant erasure of Thai Americans from historical narratives. Although a handful of scholars including Jiemin Bao and Kanjana Thepboriruk have interrogated contemporary experiences of Thai Americans, Padoongpatt’s book proves to be the first extensive work on the history of Thais in Los Angeles and U.S. Cold War interventions in Thailand. This text interrogates the deeply racialized power structures in Thailand and America that enabled Thai food to boom in Los Angeles. Thai foodways—the production, consumption, and movement of Thai food—became central to Thai American identity and community formation. While it was used to colonize Thai people and Thai Americans in the mid-twentieth century, it also served as a way for Thai communities to challenge white power structures through reclaiming a place in the global city of Los Angeles. The evidence Padoongpatt utilizes, including oral histories, U.S. Peace Corps volunteer papers, archives, cookbooks, Thai restaurant menus, and Department of State foreign relations papers, is astounding and thorough, pointing to the ways in which Thais carved out space in Los Angeles while dealing with socioeconomic issues. Food is not just a connection to cultural heritage. It is also deeply rooted in political economy through foreign policy, trade, and labor. In chapter 1, Padoongpatt traces the popularity of Thai food to informal U.S. colonialism in Thailand. Cold War relations in Thailand gave way for white American culinary [End Page 272] tourists to become authorities over Thai food. Tourists constructed the “Thai subject” via exotification and objectification. White suburban housewives, through cookbooks and recipes, defined what it meant to cook “authentic” Thai food. Padoongpatt states that while the popularity of Thai food spun a positive image of Thais in America, it became a replacement for Thai people: a way Americans could deal with the palatable parts of Thai identity. Chapter 2 highlights early Thai communities in Los Angeles, focusing on Thai grocers in East Hollywood, an area where most Thai immigrants resided in the 1970s. As Padoongpatt’s research shows, because of deindustrialization and lack of resources, areas like East Hollywood became key places for Thai immigrants to reside due to cheaper rent. The search for “yum,” the salty, sour, sweet, and spicy flavor profile of Thai food, turned into a demand for authentic products, which led to the opening of Thai markets. However, Thai grocers went through a burdensome process: securing imports, purchasing foodstuffs overseas, paying tariffs, planning the entry of goods, hiring transportation, and distributing the goods. Mr. Tilakamonkul, the owner of Bangkok Market, negotiated tariff barriers, challenged enforcement agencies, and established foreign trade zones in Mexico to produce Thai ingredients for American import. Padoongpatt directly challenges popular conceptions of the area being in “decline” by telling the history of Thai markets and Thai people not only by asserting a claim to the global city, but also by revitalizing and transforming the spaces they were forced into. Chapter 3 focuses on the food industry, the impact of Thai restaurants, and how the senses of taste and smell reestablished racial boundaries. While Thai food became a means for forming identity and community among Thais, Padoongpatt notes that Thai restaurants reinforced gender and class categorizations, where Thai men had agency through an array of roles while Thai women were subjected to the back of the kitchen or sexualized as waitresses. He conceptualizes Thai restaurants as culinary contact zones, spaces where food producers and consumers interact across race, gender, and class differences. Thai restaurants also become culinary contact zones that constructed Thai American identity, racializing Thais as an exotic nonwhite other, and thus “rendered Thai food as a stand-in for the complexities and contradictions of Thai people” (87). Chapter 4 focuses on Wat Thai and the...

An analysis of the cause and magnitude of foreign trade zone‐induced biases in US import statistics

AbstractComparisons of matched US COMTRADE and World Trade Organization IDB statistics reveal numerous instances where the WTO data on dutiable imports exceed both the corresponding UN general import statistics and the reported exports of partner countries by very large margins over extended periods. In cases, the dutiable import statistics report major trade in products for which the partners do not record any corresponding exports (to anyone). Empirical tests indicate these biases result from special (and very unorthodox) invoicing practices for shipments into US foreign trade zones. The paper concludes these problems have the potential to seriously misdirect analytical trade studies which must utilise import statistics for their empirical base.

US foreign trade zones and import intensity examining determinants of import intensity in US foreign trade zones

PurposeThe paper aims to investigate the effects of several determinants of firm import intensity in US foreign trade zones (FTZs). Even though the major objective for the establishment of US FTZs is to encourage exports by facilitating the duty-free entry of imports, US firms have used it as a gateway to import goods into the US market. Currently, over 90 per cent of US FTZ output is consumed in the USA. The author examines the major determinants for such import intensity in US FTZs.Design/methodology/approachThe study is based on a survey that was conducted to explore the factors that influence import intensity of firms operating in US FTZs.FindingsThe findings reveal that besides export orientation of firms, the most promising predictors of import intensity of firms operating in USA FTZs are the policy environment in the form of inverted tariff benefits and firm business strategy.Practical implicationsThe findings are important for managers presently operating in US FTZs or intend to do so in future.Originality/valueEven though there are numerous studies on free trade zones and exports, this is the first study to examine the import intensity of US FTZs and their determinants.

A Special Economic Zone in Brazil: The Manaus Free Trade Zone

Many are the reasons why governments decide to implement a free trade zone, or a foreign trade zone, in their own countries. The most common one is to boost the economic development of a specific region of the nation. This is achieved by offering incentives to domestic and foreign companies such as a logistic advantage by the non-applicability of certain taxes and duties on imported goods that enter the zone and are destined to the industrial sector. Brazil is no different, and established a Special Economic Zone in the northern state of Amazonas, in the middle of the rain forest and the amazon jungle.

Special Economic Zones in the United States: From Colonial Charters, to Foreign-Trade Zones, Toward USSEZs

Special economic zones (SEZs) have a long and complicated relationship with the United States. The lineage of the country runs back to proto-SEZs, created when Old World governments sold entrepreneurs charters to build for-profit colonies in the New World, such as Jamestown and New Amsterdam. In more recent times, though, the United States has lagged behind the rest of the globe in tapping the potential of SEZs, which have exploded in number, types, territory, and population. True, the US hosts a large and growing number of Foreign-Trade Zones (FTZs), but these do little more than exempt select companies from federal customs obligations. Elsewhere, SEZs have done much more to increase jurisdictional competition and improve citizens' lives. Consider the SEZs that spread from Hong Kong throughout China, lifting tens of millions of people out of poverty in the process, or the huge private developments now taking root in Africa, the Middle East, and India. This paper proposes that the United States combine the best of foreign and domestic policies to create a new generation of SEZs. These United States Special Economic Zones (USSEZs) would arise on federally owned property, such as lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management, and generate sorely needed public funds by selling territorial exemptions from select state and federal taxes, laws, and regulations. Through USSEZs, special jurisdictions might bring economic growth, human welfare, and individual freedom back to America.

The spillover effects of United States foreign trade zones

ABSTRACTThis article empirically tests the geographic and economic spillover effects of foreign trade zones (FTZs) in the United States by utilizing propensity score matching and the geographic rules of the programme. While these FTZ sites are designed to support manufacturing, we find that ZIP codes that receive FTZ sites experience growth in new and existing non-manufacturing establishments. Our results also show that FTZs spillover into nearby ZIP codes. We find that ZIP codes that border FTZ ZIP codes also experience positive effects on non-manufacturing establishments and these spillovers are strongest within a 5-mile radius of an FTZ.

The Development Process, Functional Evaluation, and Implications of World Free Trade Zones

The Free Trade Zone (FTZ) in the modern sense is one of the important forms of the realization of economic globalization. The purpose of this article is to explore the nature and characteristics of the FTZ and its significance by studying its development from free ports and export processing zones up to the new FTZs with integrated functions. Through the comparative analysis of the Irish Shannon Free Zone, the Taiwan Kaohsiung Export Processing Zone, and the US Foreign Trade Zone, this article focuses on the pros and cons of FTZs for a country or region and points out their five strengths and four weaknesses. For the construction of the Shanghai Pilot FTZ and other potential zones, this article puts forward several proposals that may provide useful reference material.

Achieving High Performance in the United Arab Emirates: The Case of biz‐group

Operating within a foreign trade zone in Dubai, biz‐group has built a solid reputation as a provider of corporate training, team building, and strategic services for organizations throughout the United Arab Emirates. Driven by its motto, “Passionate about performance,” the company strives to engender cooperation among its diverse workforce through creative culture‐building and communications activities. In an effort to analyze the effectiveness of its internal and external processes, the company participated in a research study that measured its policies and practices against a framework of high‐performance organization (HPO) characteristics. The results confirmed the company's underlying strengths and identified opportunities for improvement. In a similar vein, other organizations can use the HPO Framework to assess their own operations and home in on the characteristics they need to develop in order to improve performance. ©2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Structural contingencies and untimely coincidences in the making of neoliberal India

This article introduces the concepts of untimely coincidences of modes of production and structural contingencies in global capitalism to the study of neoliberalism in India and beyond. I argue that these concepts are crucial to revive a historical anthropology, which shows that neoliberalism is one of several possible manifestations of capitalism, past and present. The analytical gain of such a revised view on neoliberalism is then exemplified by a historical–anthropological account of the development of India’s first special economic zone, the Kandla Foreign Trade Zone, from 1965 to the late 1980s. Based on these findings, I conclude my plea for conceptual changes in anthropology’s approach to periodising national and global histories of neoliberalism.

Legislative Strategic Synergy and Capital Efficiency: 'Job Creation, Sustainable Competitive Advantage and the Inherent Nature of Inflation'

Paper reveals why inflation exists in the first place and discusses the strategic synergies that can be generated by amended regulations between the Foreign Trade Zone program, Immigration and Naturalization Act's various investor visa programs, and Free Trade Agreements. Further discussion references the process by which these job-creating legislative Acts affect capital efficiency and the monetary systems need for continuous expansion as well as how it expands.