In The News

Overseas Job Shift Affects Office Market

Terry Pristin October 8, 2003
The offshore outsourcing trend in the United States has claimed another victim: the market for commercial real estate. As firms transfer more back-office operations to low-wage countries, the already sluggish demand for office space in the US has slumped considerably more. "It's just going to take longer to get the numbers down to palatable percentages," said Dale Anne Reiss,...

Globalization Hurts USA

John Sweeney October 2, 2003
With the US economy in a slump, American labor leaders are calling for a change in US trade policy. John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, the largest union in America, argues that globalization, at least as it relates to trade policy, has failed both working Americans and poor workers in developing countries. Because world trade agreements encourage American manufacturing companies to take...

Can Rich Countries Stem the Outflow of Jobs?

Eddie Lee September 23, 2003
Last month, the United States lost 93,000 jobs, many of them in the service sector. This commentary in Singapore's Straits Times attributes this job loss to outsourcing by developed world companies. In an effort to cut costs, many companies are hiring workers in developing countries since they are willing to work for far less than their counterparts in the US and Singapore. As the...

No Good Reason to Dance

Ernesto Zedillo September 22, 2003
In the latest round of WTO talks, the chasm between 'developed' and 'developing' nations over agricultural subsidies proved too large to cross in only one week. The Cancun meeting has thus been largely declared a failure. Ernesto Zedillo, Director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization and former president of Mexico, says that this difficulty should be taken as a...

China Joins the Global Economy - Part One

David Zweig September 15, 2003
Just over two decades ago, China was a vast, poor country whose centrally-planned economy offered its citizenry little hope for an improved standard of living. After a series of market-oriented reforms, however, many Chinese now regularly enjoy luxuries that were once reserved for the elite. In part one of a 2-part series on China's entry into the world economy, China expert David Zweig...

Protests Greet Yet Another WTO Meeting

Pranab Bardhan September 8, 2003
As the World Trade Organization prepares to meet in Cancun, Mexico, backers and detractors of globalization are clashing again, with each side claiming to represent the interests of the world's poor. Those opposed to globalization in its current form point to an increase in inequality and poverty in countries that have opened up to international capital and corporations, while supporters...

As China Gallops, Mexico Sees Factory Jobs Slip Away

Juan Forero September 3, 2003
The search for profit drives companies to look for the lowest production costs possible, and that search is taking more and more American companies from factories in Mexico to factories in China. America's southern neighbor received a boom in employment after the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement in the 1990s, but China's rise as a supplier of cheap labor is now...