Those as long in the tooth as me will know that, even in nominal terms, it costs less to buy a pair of jeans and a t-shirt today than it did thirty or forty years ago. The result is a significant contribution to real income growth over that period. In what follows I’ll flesh out these numbers a little further and say something too about their distributional effects. (One particular point in this respect is that the real income benefit of lower import prices is probably most marked for those at the lower end of the distribution.) I’ll mention the parallels, long recognised by economists, between the effects of growing trade and those of technical progress, and the role of the latter in rising inequality in the US. I’ll conclude with some remarks about the sort of things economists might have to think about as the UK leaves the EU. Globalisation and its effects on UK clothing Globalisation hasn’t occurred smoothly nor is there a single, discrete date at which it began. Its broad features are reasonably clear in Charts 1 and 2. Chart 1: Globalisation: a timeline  Source: NBER Macrohistory Database and Barclays calculations (Keller et al 2017)  1  D. N. McCloskey, "The Industrial Revolution in Britain 1780-1860: A Survey," in Roderick Floud and Donald McCloskey, The Economic History of Britain since 1700.
Charts 8a and 8b are interesting in this respect. Using numbers from the decennial UK census, they plot developments in regional labour markets since 1981 – in particular changes in aggregate employment and labour market participation – against the share of employment in clothing and textiles at the start of the period. Chart 8a: Regions with larger clothing sectors  Chart 8b: This was reflected in higher inactivity  in 1981 tended to experience slightly lower  rather than unemployment  growth in overall employment over following decade  Source: UK Census, Nomis  Source: UK Census, Nomis  There’s clearly lots of unexplained variation. Most of these regional differences are entirely unrelated to the particular starting conditions. Nor is there any correlation at all, it turns out, between the initial share of clothing and textile employment and what happens subsequently to the local rate of unemployment. 5  Samuelson (2004) points out that, if country A starts to experience rapid productivity growth in a good in which another country B has had a comparative advantage, and is large enough to affect global prices in that good, this can worsen B’s terms of trade sufficiently to reduce its net income. If (for example) B has traditionally been very good at making mousetraps, and A suddenly finds a new and cheaper way of making them, B could end up worse off (at least until it gets better at something else).