These adjustments can be painful for individuals, and it is incumbent on policy-makers to help buffer the transition by ensuring adequate safety nets for workers and facilitating retraining and relocation. But the benefits of integrative trade shouldn’t be ignored. It has meant increasing incomes for economies. It has made many products much more widely accessible to more people.
And it has meant continued job growth at home. Implications and alternatives My argument is that a significant part of the strong productivity performance in the two decades before the crisis was due to globalization, and that the globalization process may have brought trade in the global economy to a new balancing point.