The advantages of free trade are drifting ever further out of focus – perhaps that is partly because they are less immediately apparent and harder to pinpoint than the drawbacks. But in my view, there is one thing we must not forget. Open markets and a competitive economic system are qualities that underpin our prosperity.
The 1994 Mexican problems have cost about 12-15 per cent of GDP; the Nordic countries spent 4-8 per cent of their GDP fixing their problems a few years ago; even the S&L problems in the United States (merely a small sub-group of the financial sector) cost around 3 per cent of GDP to sort out.