"trap" in this context means "coordination trap" which is a scenario in which competition forces individual actors to adopt policies they don't want, but can't avoid.
Imagine you and I are neighboring farmers who irrigate our fields from the same river. Our farms grow, as does our water use, until we're each using half the water. I buy a bigger water pump and start sucking up most of the water, leaving you with dying crops. So you go out and buy an even bigger pump; now you're getting most of the water, and some of my crops are dying.
What's the result? There are only two outcomes here: either we agree to split the water, or we spend more and more money on larger and larger pumps until neither of us has any profit left over. The latter outcome is the "trap" - neither of us wants to spend every spare dollar on pumps, but unless we come up with some agreement, that's what will happen.
No, this is another kind of US enforcement regime. It starts with setting a global minimum tax rate, and ends with the US pursuing and punishing developing nations to its advantage.
Also once the US can manage to get 130 countries to agree to its tax regime in one area, guaranteed it won't stop there.
I mean, sure, and this could describe almost any resource-sharing situation ever.
I'd say that this however is not a resource sharing situation. It's a competition for the magical money tree of corporation taxes. And that's a good thing, because "setting up an environment in which businesses cannot thrive" is often a vote winner, but is a terrible idea.
The key ingredient in a "race to the bottom" is not resource sharing, it's competition combined with a feedback mechanism. Resource sharing figures in a lot of examples, because "consume most of the resources" is a common way to win a competition, but it's not necessary; for example there's no resource being shared in the classic prisoner's dilemma.
Anyway, you're right that this a competition for corp tax money, and that it could be bad in theory if there was no competition for it, since e.g. we could all collectively agree to set the corp tax rate too high, which I agree would be bad. But there's no ratchet effect. All we have to do to avoid the "taxes too high" problem is be aware of it and decide not to do that, whereas we cannot avoid the "race to the bottom" problem by being aware of it, we need an agreement like the one described in the article.
Yeah, it won't cure baldness either. What it will do is solve a specific problem (countries undercutting each other and driving the tax rate to zero) which AFAIK has no other solution. The fact that it doesn't also solve a different problem we don't yet have is not a good reason to abandon it.
Joseph Stiglitz has written some interesting books on corporate behaviour in developing countries, such as "Globalization and its Discontents".
The argument is, is that poorer countries, especially those with natural resources, would do better nurturing their own corporations, rather than creating policies to attract foreign corporations.
The end result of preferring foreign corporations is a race-to-the-bottom where the end result is that corporations become a law unto themselves, operating as if they miniature states within the host state.
How does turning the poorest people in a country into wage slaves "benefit" those poor countries? Those poor people would be better off just being self sufficient farmers at that point. Workers at foxconn were literally killing themselves because of how bad the conditions were. When do we as a society decide that industrialization makes life worse for a huge percentage of the population? These multinationals go into poor countries with no worker protection laws specifically to exploit people. That only benefits those multinationals and their owners.
Would the workers at Foxconn be better off if we took away their option to work at Foxconn? In general, if they thought that was their best option, it's hard for me to accept at that step an argument that providing them that option is making their life worse [than it would otherwise be]. Maybe there are a few more steps in the argument that make that position stronger?
Pretty much every country had or will have an exploitation phase before they get wealthy. The only difference is that some countries still have their exploitation phase ahead of them.
