In Defense of Globalization

Today, the principal focus of anti-globalizers is not the effect of globalization on economic prosperity but its harm to social agendas such as the reduction of child labour and poverty, the maintenance of rich-country labour and environmental standards, the exercise of national sovereignty, the maintenance of local culture, and women’s rights and welfare. The contrary view, which I defend in this essay, is that economic globalization advances the achievement of that social agenda. But we must ask: what institutional and policy framework is necessary to improve on the benign outcomes that globalization fetches?

Trade and wages: choosing among alternative explanations

North-South trade competition cannot be an explanation for the adverse trend for U.S. unskilled wages. If wage competition in these industries from abroad pushed down wages, then prices of these goods should also have gone down, and they have not. Also VERs and anti-dumping measures have protected exactly the wage earners supposedly threatened.International trade ; Labor turnover ; Labor unions ; Wages

Lessons from the East Asian experience: opening address

Financial crises ; Monetary policy ; Bank supervision ; Financial crises - Asia