Free Trade and its Enemies

While globalization is supposed to bring people across the world closer, it has also created a deep division of opinion. Though economists generally emphasize the gains from free trade, opponents fear that, among other things, globalization will widen the gap between the poor and the rich, that it will lead to preponderance of firms over governments and that economic integration is detrimental to the environment. This paper looks for the weak spots in the economists' defense of globalization. To let the exposition be concise, two restrictions are adopted. First, the focus is mainly on the integration of goods markets, resulting from international agreements and from declining transport and communication costs. The focus is thus more on free trade than on globalization, which is a concept with many different aspects and many different connotations. Second, only a (small) part of the economic literature on globalization and free trade is covered. The references just provide examples of the arguments on which the economists' defense rests.