> Do foreign merchants feel they can make deals as equals with the native American merchants? Can foreigners trust that the American courts are fair and neutral and unbiased?
As a foreigner, I feel somewhat qualified to answer that question.
The corruption perceptions and international ease of doing business surveys and rankings would provide more statistically significant evidence to counter your anecdote. Note that competition is relative - we may find the U.S. courts deplorable on specific issues but they do turn out a measure better than most other economic powers' courts, e.g. China, Russia, or Brazil.
Did you look at the actual data behind this survey? I just did, and it's a little sketchy.
The US ranks alongside the rest of Europe for most of the data sources that include the US (many of TI's data sources do not), except for two surveys which sharply differ:
* TI's own "Bribery Payer's Index", which gives the US a 4.6 out of 10 (a score more compatible with Southeast Asia than North America) in the crosstabs, but for which the actual TI BPI report gives results back in line with Europe.
* IMD's survey from 2010, which gives the US a 6.5 (again, significantly lower than Europe) but for which no actual data appears to be publicly available.
In both cases, the actual data extracted from these surveys (the TI index is a meta-analysis of many surveys; a survey of surveys) is "phone surveys to business leaders"; TI has selected specific questions from these surveys as indicative and discarded the rest of them. In the IMD case, for instance, there appears to be one question at all that's selected from the survey: "Is there bribery or corruption, yes or no".
A 6.5 score from the IMD report puts the US in the 6-7 band along with Estonia, Malaysia, Spain, and Israel. This seems like an extraordinary claim, as is the claim that there is less bribery in Qatar and Chile than in the US.
Similarly, the 4.x score in the BPI survey puts the US in a band with China, Russia, the Czech Republic, the Philippines and Argentina. This is an extraordinary claim, requiring extraordinary evidence.
If you excluded the BPI and IMD surveys from the data set, the US would probably be duking it out for tenths of a point at the top of the list with the rest of Europe. As it stands, we're simply in the top quintile, unlike China.
I agree that this is an extroidinary claim, but it is technically named as the Corruption Perception Index, which is relevent to the discussion about the perception of organizations doing business in different countries.
The real question is: Is there any other data on this scale to refute or back this research?
Once again, it's relative. It's not just corruption that matters, it's also economic power. Germany, for example, is ranked above the US at 14 in the CPI. However, the US is ranked 4th in ease of doing business, while Germany is 20th.
Economic power is also somewhat based on productive might (GDP, basically). If it weren't then we'd expect New Zealand to be the economic center of the world. Are we really going to argue that New Zealand is the economic center of the world?
The only entity I see which even comes close to matching these figures is the EU as a single entity. However, recent events have shown us that the EU is not a single entity.
>The corruption perceptions and international ease of doing business surveys and rankings would provide more statistically significant evidence to counter your anecdote.
As a foreigner in the US, who have lived and worked in two BRICS (Brazil and China) and visited a third (Russia), I don't think you've properly made your case. What about doing business here is inherently less fair to you as a foreigner doing business?
I explicitly am asking about doing business in the sense of trade of goods or services, both buying and selling. I am not talking about coming here as an employee on an immigrant visa.
As a foreigner, I feel somewhat qualified to answer that question.
No. Categorically, no.