Although opinions do differ on the scope of competence of institutions and administrations, carefully crafted structures and networks of national and international bodies and rules can ease the political trilemma. Economic fallacies about globalisation It is useful to re-state the case for free trade from its early origins, which date back to a time even before the seminal work of David Ricardo.
In fact, it was recognised back in 1701 that the benefits from trade are very similar to those from technology. 15 The concept of comparative advantage makes the argument even stronger and suggests that free trade is not a zero-sum game because differences in comparative, and not absolute, costs matter.16 But like technological progress, free trade has distributional effects.