In The News

Globalization’s Unequal Discontents

William H. Overholt January 23, 2007
Sometimes globalization is a mechanism that levels playing fields and sometimes it is a bulldozer. Throughout history, globalization has often enriched business owners and risk-takers, while doing little for ordinary workers. In recent years, the modern workforce has gradually included more workers from China, India and other emerging nations, and that global competition has stagnated wages for...

The Great Unbundling

January 23, 2007
The model of comparative advantage built on the works of Adam Smith and David Ricardo has rarely been challenged as the predominant rationale for international trade. With individual tasks of all sorts increasingly shipped overseas, some economists seek new theories to explain the logic behind the offshoring of services. Gene Grossman and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, for example, have labeled...

Migrant Power

January 19, 2007
A new World Bank report shows that migration remains a significant force in Eastern Europe and Central Asia almost two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall. While the initial surge of migration in the 1990s was due to ethnic reconsolidation, there has been a growing movement of workers seeking economic opportunity from the region’s poorer nations. According to the report, the remittances...

The Other Malaysia: ASEAN and Globalization

Farish A Noor January 18, 2007
An integrated world economy is seen by many as beneficial for the developing world, but recent events in Southeast Asia cause some to question this optimism. After an announcement to impose controls on foreign capital in Thailand led to a 14 percent drop in Bangkok’s stock market, the newly-installed government was forced to retract its statement in a desperate effort to avoid a repeat of the...

Opening Up the Transatlantic Market

Daniel S. Hamilton January 15, 2007
Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany and president of the G-8, urges a transatlantic free-trade agreement. Except for a few high-profile squabbles, trade barriers between the two continents are already low and the US Senate has already given its approval of such an agreement, note transatlantic analysts Daniel Hamilton and Joseph Quinlan. The authors point out that a US state like Illinois has...

Technology, Not Globalization, Is Driving Wages Down

Jagdish Bhagwati January 10, 2007
Confronting wage stagnation, US labor groups blame trade and immigration from developing countries. But economic research does not support the assertion that competition with developing nations reduces either wages or bargaining power, argues Columbia University professor Jagdish Bhagwali of Columbia University. If anything, ongoing technological innovations reduce the need for unskilled labor,...

Globalization Story Still Has a Long Way to Go

Daniel Altman January 10, 2007
Analysts may argue that globalization has passed its peak, while encouraging terror, crime and disease. But such analysis ignores the data, argues Daniel Altman who writes a globalization column for “The International Herald Tribune.” Exports of merchandise and trade in commercial services increased by 60 percent, value of global mergers and acquisitions increased by almost 40 percent, and...