The Wrong Enemy

he economic development of poor countries is heavily dependent on their
ability to export. But many American liberals are troubled, wrongly in my view,
that commerce with low-wage countries will infect our own body politic. Rather
than worrying so much about Third World export growth, we should be addressing
how to attain full domestic employment and mobility. We need to concentrate on
formulating policies that make trade the mutual opportunity promised in the
textbooks. If we fail to do this, trade will still provide an economic gain on
average, but will also represent a costly burden for the victims of the abrupt
dislocations it causes.

The Third World is growing. Almost half of the world's population resides in
China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey, and Thailand, poor countries where,
even in the richest of them (Thailand), adjusted per capita income is only about
one-fourth of ours. Yet in these countries recent growth rates of manufactured
goods have been phenomenal. Between 1990 and 1995, the annual growth in
manufacturing output has ranged from a "low" of 4.7 percent in Turkey to a high
of 17.2 percent in China.

International trade has played a critical role in this growth. In four of
these countries, export growth exceeded 10 percent per year between 1990 and
1995, and in the other two it was nearly as great. Furthermore, the countries'
economic modernization is most dramatically revealed in the composition of their
exports. As recently as 1980, manufactures as a share of exports exceeded 50
percent only in the case of India, and was as low as 2 percent in Indonesia.
Thirteen years later, manufactures exceeded 70 percent of exports in all cases
except that of Indonesia, where it had grown to 53 percent. What is clear is
that the economic success of these large countries has been heavily based upon
their ability to produce and sell manufactured goods overseas.

Despite these impressive accomplishments, export-led growth in the Third
World is seen as a threat by many American liberals. A number of progressive
legislators, commentators, and activists, who otherwise express great concern
for poverty, sincerely believe that expanded exports from poor countries to the
United States threaten American wages and environmental protections. Some even
suggest that contemporary modernization benefits only small elites.

For example, in the recent Sierra Club publication The Case Against the
Global Economy
, critic Jerry Mander writes that "even at its optimum
performance level, the long-term benefits [of global development] go only to a
tiny minority of people who sit at the hub of the process and to a slightly
larger minority that can retain an economic connection to it."

But Mander's assessment of the benefits of growth is almost certainly wrong.
The development in South and East Asia has, with the likely exception of China,
been accompanied by an increasingly equal distribution of income. In China the
share of income received by the poorest 20 percent of households is quite low
only 5.5 percent. Nevertheless, that country's economic growth was associated
with what the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) described as a
"dramatic" decline in poverty through the mid-1980s. Though this favorable trend
stalled during the last half of that decade, the UNDP reports that in recent
years poverty is once again falling, with the number of rural poverty-stricken
people in China dropping from 94 million to 65 million between 1991 and mid-1995. In Asia the benefits of growth have in fact raised the region's standard
of living.

Mander is also incorrect when he contends that Asia's rapid growth has been
fueled by an ideology of economic deregulation and free trade. These countries
in fact do not subscribe to "the need for free trade to stimulate the growth;
the unrestricted 'free market'; the absence of government regulation; and
voracious consumerism combined with an aggressive advocacy of a uniform
worldwide development model that faithfully reflects the Western corporate
vision and serves corporate interests." Evidence of their deviation from this
view, referred to as the Washington Consensus, is provided by the Heritage
Foundation and the Wall Street Journal, themselves ardent supporters of
laissez-faire. In the ranking of "economic freedom" provided by these
organizations, none of the six countries shows up as a participant in the free
market paradigm. The most "free"that is, the one that most conforms to the
modelis Thailand. But even that country ranks only twenty-third of the 148
countries assessed. By contrast, Turkey's ranking is 50, Indonesia's is 59,
Pakistan's is 78, India's is 118, and China's is 125. The same liberals who
worry about low-wage competition have criticized just these countries for
practicing other forms of neo-mercantilism.

Subscribe to The American Prospect

ther critics have faulted globalization for creating cultural
convergence. Elites, such as the French intelligentsia, try to resist this when
they seek to limit imports of American movies. More importantly, trade does
promote a kind of convergence; with technological advance providing the impetus
to development, strong pressures are generated in every modernizing society to
ensure the availability of scientists, engineers, and employees capable of
working with modern technology. Richard A. Easterlin, a leading scholar of the
long-term growth process, writes, "the greater complexity of the new methods
requires literacy and numeracy on the part of workers and hence a better
educated labor force to learn and execute the new technologies."

In The Case Against the Global Economy, Helena Norberg-Hodge, a
Swedish environmental activist, mourns the loss of traditional education, which
she describes as "the product of a person's intimate relationship with the
community and the ecosystem"a loss that occurs when children are taught to
adopt a scientific worldview.

Despite her unhappiness with modernization, Norberg-Hodge stops short of
alleging that it is an imposition on an unwilling population. Rather she
maintains that the people in poor countries are ignorant of modernization's
cultural implications. She reports that in the Himalayan province of Ladakh
(Kashmir), the population, after observing tourists, came to believe that all
Westerners are multimillionaires who never work. Beyond that, films and
television seemed to demonstrate that with economic growth, machines do
everything. Distorted in this way, Norberg-Hodge concedes that "the picture is
irresistible" and the "same pattern is being repeated in rural areas all over
the South, where millions of young people believe contemporary Western culture
to be far superior to their own." Thus, even modernization's most severe critics
agree that its onset is likely to be welcomed rather than resisted by the people
living in poor countries.


International trade has obviously benefited the rapidly growing Asian
countries. But it has also benefited the countries to which these countries have
exported, including the United States. On one hand, developing countries'
growing income and growing market size have allowed the United States to
increase its own exports. On the other hand, and too often overlooked in
discussions of international trade, we gain from our ability to import, since
purchasing goods from abroad allows us to buy at relatively low prices. Thus the
fact that the share of our exports going to Asia between 1990 and 1995 increased
from 18.2 percent to 22.7 percent, while our share of imports from that
continent grew from 23.8 percent to 26.6 percent, meant that Asia's growth
contributed in two ways to our welfare. Increased exports raised our incomes.
But so too did increased imports. In this latter connection, economist Adrian
Wood estimates that if imports from the Southhis designation for the poor
countries of the world including but not confined to Asiahad not been
available, those goods typically would have "cost about three times as much if
they were made in the North."

Despite the benefits of trade, there are also concerns. With trade comes
dislocation. Industries that are successful in finding markets overseas thrive.
Their firms are profitable and jobs are created. But other industries suffer,
unable to match the price or quality of imports. In these cases, firms may go
bankrupt and jobs may be lost. If this flux occurred in the context of a fully
employed economy, the resulting problems would not be substantial, as labor and
other resources simply moved from declining industries to expanding ones. Wages
would rise as workers shifted to highly productive employment opportunities in
industries producing for expanding domestic and overseas markets.

Typically, however, such a benign environment does not prevail. Full
employment rarely is present, and as a result workers displaced from defunct
firms tend to be added to the ranks of the jobless. Moreover, where imports
compete directly with domestic producers and can match the latter's quality and
productivity, there is a tendency for wage rates to be bid down toward the level
prevailing overseas. Finally, when overseas markets do not expand as rapidly as
imports, a country's currency will tend to decline in value internationally,
reducing its consumers' ability to buy from abroad.

Thus the real-world version of international trade is messier than the
textbook version. The gains associated with trade are real and accrue to the
society as a whole. But there are costs, and those costs are borne
disproportionately by specific segments of the economy and labor force. That
those hurt tend to be low-productivity workers or inefficient firms makes their
pain no less real.

The fact that each of these concerns possesses either real or potential
validity has given impetus to the view that we should reverse the trend toward
increased participation in the world economy. But to do so would be to attack
the wrong enemy. Instead, since trade represents an engine of growth, we should
adjust in order to minimize the difficulties imposed in taking advantage of its
dynamism. We should work to solve the problems associated with our increasing
involvement in the global economy rather than avoiding those problems and
retreating from that involvement. A successful adjustment would allow both the
United States and developing countries to continue the mutually beneficial
relationship that the globalization of production allows.

The problem most frequently cited by trade critics is our increasing current
account deficit, caused by the fact that imports have grown more than exports.
Robert E. Scott, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), writes
that "we must recognize that our trade policies have created a balance of
payments crisis for the United States." In fact, this is the smallest concern
generated by global trade. If such a crisis existed it would take the form of a
devaluation of the dollar. Such a fall would have devastating consequences for
world trade because of the dollar's continuing status as the international
reserve currency. But in fact there is no evidence that the trade deficit has
caused anything like a crisis. Precisely because of the role the United States
dollar plays worldwide, the demand for it greatly exceeds the level suggested by
our exports. Thus, despite the continuing current account deficit, there has not
been a tendency for the dollar to decline in value. According to the Economic
Report of the President
for 1997, the index of the trade-weighted value of
the dollar stood at 86 in 1990 and 87.3 in the fourth quarter of 1996.

A second major concern of critics is that United States trade with the Third
World has had a negative impact on our labor market. Again, Scott is
representative. He writes that "increased imports of goods from low-wage
countries have depressed U.S. production workers' wages, U.S. foreign direct
investment in these countries has further weakened the bargaining power of our
workers, and unfair trade and industrial policies of key trading partners have
reduced the number of high-wage jobs in this country."

There is validity to this concern. There is a body of analytic work linking
deteriorating labor market conditions for the unskilled to increased imports.
Adrian Wood, for example, has produced estimates suggesting that imports from
low-wage countries have caused a 5 percent fall in the demand for unskilled
labor in the developed world. In the United States, where wages are more
flexible than in Europe, this decline in demand has shown up mainly as an
increase in the gap between the wages of the unskilled relative to the skilled.
In Europe, in contrast, where wages are less flexible, the result of trade with
developing nations has been to increase unemployment among the unskilled. Is the
best solution, then, to curtail the purchase of goods from poor countries?

Wood says no, observing that protectionism "is clearly the least desirable of
the possible alternatives." Tariff protection, he writes, "would help unskilled
workers in the North, but would be more costly than other ways of doing so" and
in the process "would hurt much poorer workers in the South." If implemented,
Wood concludes, protectionism "would rob many millions of people in the South of
the chance to work their way out of much more serious poverty."

Yet the temptation to curb imports remains powerful. Scott writes that
"global quotas should be imposed on a few products from industries that account
for a large portion of the trade deficit." In addition he recommends raising
tariffs "to resolve fundamental bilateral trade disputes with Japan and some of
the developing countries that are pursuing aggressive strategies aimed at
export-led growth," and he proposes the imposition of country-specific limits on
the rights of United States businesses to invest abroad.

There are two fallacies in this view of problem and remedy. The first is that
it scapegoats the efforts of people in poor countries to achieve higher
standards of living. The second is that it overlooks better remedies, such as
domestic full employment and investment in worker retraining and mobility.


The protectionist impulse falsely implies that a zero-sum game is necessarily
at work in trade among nations. It implicitly accepts the view that the
interests of workers in poor countries can only be advanced when the interests
of the labor force in rich countries are harmed. That this is a false dilemma is
precisely the lesson that international trade theoryand practiceteaches. With
supportive policies in place in both sets of countries, advancing the interests
of one group will promote the well-being of the other. Therefore, the response
of choice, I believe, is not to attack trade, but to implement domestic policies
that will allow the gains from increasing trade to be widely dispersed
throughout the population.

It is relatively easy to outline the domestic policies that should be adopted
in light of the increased integration of the world economy. Our fundamental
objective should be to ensure that the industries that come to dominate the
American economy are sufficiently productive to be competitive internationally
even though they offer high wages. The only way successfully to protect the
standard of living in this country is for our industries to be at the
technological frontier. Government policy must actively promote that objective.
It is critical, for example, that our educational system produce graduates
capable of being highly productive in a technologically sophisticated workplace.
Seen in this light, the poor performance of our urban public schools harms not
only their students, but the nation as a whole. Poorly educated young people
retard productivity growth when they become members of the labor force.

Conversely, we should not attempt to preserve the life of those industries
whose survival is dependent upon the use of low-cost labor. These are industries
that can compete successfully only if they are engaged in a race to the bottom
in wages. Tariff protection for them will slow the process of adjustment
necessary to ensure that we remain a high-wage country. We should be aiming at
an economy that is increasingly composed of high-productivity sectors rather
than low-productivity ones. To be sure, the latter will continue to exist, especially in sectors not subject to overseas competition, but it should not be
the objective of public policy to defend low-wage industries from imports. Doing
so has the perverse effect of increasing the numbers of the working poor.

The benefits of trade are most equally distributed when there is full
employment. In such a context, the demise of one industry acts simply as a
signal for labor redeployment. Such a reallocation of the labor force is most
efficiently accomplished when the demand for labor is strong. In such a setting,
workers will enjoy more bargaining power, and therefore avoid becoming the
victims of the dynamism associated with trade. It is the ready availability of
alternative employment opportunities that, to a great extent, determines whether
trade will harm or help workers.

An economy successfully participating in trade at high-wage levels will be
constantly in flux. New industries will emerge, the product of advancing
technology, and will require ever-better-educated labor. In such a context it
will be critical that workers, displaced from declining industries, be
encouraged and afforded the opportunity to move into these new jobs. But success
in this regard will be possible only if workers develop the appropriate skills.
Their "human capital" will have to be increased. In this way trade produces
precisely the pressures that, if responded to positively, can result in economic
advance. What is required are supportive government policies, especially with
respect to adult education.

In addition to job retraining and continuing education, public-sector
employment will have to be available to those who are capable of working but who
continue not to meet the ever-advancing requirements of the private sector.
Government will have to be the employer of last resort. Beyond all of this,
income and household income supports will have to be available to those who
simply cannot keep up with the dynamism present in the economy. Thus not only
will an earned income tax credit program be necessary, but in all likelihood
income transfers will have to be available to those who are unable even to take
advantage of the work opportunities made available by government.

These, of course, are the kinds of programs that left-liberals have long
advocated; they should still be at the top of our agenda. What is new is the
context. The United States, as the most important market in the world, has the
power to slow if not completely choke off the economic modernization of the
Third World. This is something we as a society should not do, and it especially
is not a stance liberals should adopt.

Instead we should endorse globalization as an effective way to allow people
throughout the world to escape poverty. Rather than oppose the spread of
development and the growth of international trade, we should work politically
for domestic policies that can ensure that the benefits of increased
international economic integration are widely and fairly shared. In this way
complementarity, rather than conflict, can come to characterize the relationship
between the labor forces of both the developed and the underdeveloped

You need to be logged in to comment.