WTO Rules Against Airbus for Illegal Subsidies, while China subsidizes Paper Industry

The WTO has ruled against Airbus for illegal government subsidies.

The World Trade Organization ruled Wednesday that European governments gave planemaker Airbus illegal subsidies in its battle with U.S. competitor Boeing Co., in a first key ruling on a long-running dispute between the European Union and Washington.

Problem is the ruling is over 1000 pages and interpretation, as in will anything happen as a result, is confusing. So now the U.S. and the EU are arguing over what the ruling means.

Take, for example, one key argument in the dispute: did the U.S. prove that Airbus funding was harming Boeing? The U.S. says yes, as the panel recognized the ''serious prejudice'' suffered by the Chicago-based company.

But the EU is happy that American claims of ''material injury'' were rejected.

There were differing views on whether that means European subsidies were responsible for lost American jobs or market share.

Another question is what this means if the U.S. wishes to subsidize and protect key industries and innovation for future economic growth.

Notice this ruling comes years too late to stop Airbus from taking away orders and business from Boeing.

Meanwhile EPI has a new report, which shows China subsidized it's paper industry by $33 billion dollars from 2002-2009 to overtake the global market.

The U.S. paper industry is large and highly competitive, employing 474,000 workers in nearly 5,000 plants in the 2005-2007 period. However, thousands of U.S. paper producers, and the roughly 400,000 remaining jobs, are at risk due to the rapid growth of highly subsidized paper exports from China. Almost every state has workers in the paper sector. Among the highest are California, Georgia, Illinois, Ohio and Wisconsin.

The Alliance for American Manufacturing has a website to find out how many paper manufacturing jobs were lost per Congressional district.

From 2002 through the end of 2009, U.S. employment in the paper and paper products sector dropped 29 percent, from roughly 557,000 workers to 398,000.

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