Whose Interests Should Be the Paramount Concern of Government Trade Policy - the Interests of Producers (Businesses and Their Employees) or Those of Consumers?

exported about $27 million worth of asbestos products and Nearly 1.7 billion pounds of pesticides were exported from U.S. ports between 2001 and 2003. Nearly 28 million pounds of those pesticides were products forbidden in the U.S. (Peebles, 2013). One of the guidelines for selling these forbidden products to other countries is that disclosure is made to the foreign country that the product they are being sold is banned for sale in the US. By providing them with this information we are giving them the opportunity to decline the potentially dangerous product while making an unethical decision appear to be ethical for the good of the US by cashing in on unsafe items which carry hefty costs to safely dispose of.

There is no doubt that increasing in international trade is supporting the economic growth across the world, raising incomes and creating jobs. However, international trade can also some create economic obstacles, such as the international context and the market policy and regulations of each country, and consequently it can be said that the effects would have positive and negative sides, and it is useful to mention all of them and to take them into consideration.

“Free trade is not working for the majority of the world. During a most recent period of rapid growth in global trade and investment — 1960 to 1998 — inequality worsened both internationally and within countries. The UN Development Program reports that the richest 20 percent of the world's population consume 86 percent of the world's resources while the poorest 80 percent consume just 14 percent. WTO rules have hastened these trends by opening up countries to foreign investment and thereby making it easier for production to go where the labor is cheapest and most easily exploited and environmental costs are low. This pulls down wages and environmental standards in developed countries that have to compete globally.”

Weeks, R. (2006). International trade issues. New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc..World Bank.org. (November, 2011). Globalization and international trade (Chapter12, pp.

Raghavan, Chakravarthi (2000). The World Trade Organization and its Dispute Settlement System. Retrieved from: http://www.twnside.org.sg/title/tilting.htm

Globalization over the past twenty has become an issue in many countries. This industrialization of second and third world countries by Western Civilization creates many opportunities for the inhabitants. Not only does it expand trading markets, but also promotes productivity and efficiency; thus improving the country and integrating it into the industrial world. This process not only benefits third world counties, but also industrialized nations by allowing them to export goods to the developing world and increase their profit margin.

Impressed by this worldwide supply chain and the international entanglement of markets we now want to discuss some of the bases of global trade, its implications and the advantages and disadvantages of such an evolution. The major reason behind international expansion and the import of goods is the search for minimum labour cost at a certain quality level or the highest quality for a certain price. Products are bought from the best and cheapest producers whereas transportation costs often play a secondary role. Domestic producers, paying wages many times higher than in developing countries, cannot always fulfil the requirements. Products, which only require low skilled workers, are already produced and imported from abroad since many years. Moreover, as the workers in low-wage areas gets more educated, foreign companies challenge more and more the local white-collar workforce. Isn't this evolution a major threat to our local labour market?

Trade policy continues to be an important aspect in globalization at least in some of the lower income developing countries. Widespread use of computers, faxes and mobile phones, introduction of the internet and e-commerce, are quicker and cheaper means of transportation. In some cases offered in opportunities to developing countries, but in other cases between global firms and traditional industries globalization opened up other opportunities for developing countries to create jobs and expand exports. In practice, many developing countries competing for foreign investors offered longer tax holidays, costly subsidies, and various incentives for multinationals. The competition among developing nations reduced positive net effects of globalization or, furthermore, delayed them.

With economic globalization, international trade is developing and growing at an unprecedented rate. After China joined the WTO, international trade tariffs reduced significantly；many non-tariff barriers were also reduced. However, some countries have adopted some new trade restrictions in order to protect their industries and markets. The ‘green barrier’ policy is a kind of trade protection means which has been frequently used by the developed countries since the 1990s, it has created unequal trade relations for a vast number of developing countries and caused huge economic losses to these developing countries. It has become the new obstacle for international trade. Briefly, the problems are: first, an increase in the cost of enterprises, affecting the international competitiveness of enterprises and second, the implementation of ‘green trade’ barriers hindering the development of the Chinese export trade. This essay will examine these problems in more detail and seek to offer possible solutions.

After the end of the World War II the world faced the challenges of economic and social recovery. The majority of developing countries based their economies on Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI), the state-oriented approach to a trade and economic policy. ISI supports the replacement of import with domestic production in order to reduce foreign dependency. This protectionist policy dominated in developing countries, especially in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, during the first 30 years after the World War II. By 1980s, when the main gains of ISI were exhausted and it demonstrated its inefficiency, the countries of East Asia adopted a new development strategy. Consequently, this new export-oriented and market-friendly strategy, so-called East Asian model, has determined the successful economic and trade policy of East Asian countries during the next several decades. To understand the reasons of the shift from ISI to the East Asian model, it is needed to carefully examine and contrast these two approaches and their supporting theories.

Free trade has long be seen by economists as being essential in promoting effective use of natural resources, employment, reduction of poverty and diversity of products for consumers. But the concept of free trade has had many barriers to over come. Including government practices by developed countries, under public and corporate pressures, to protect domestic firms from cheap foreign products. But as history has shown us time and time again is that protectionist measures imposed by governments has almost always had negative effects on the local and world economies. These protectionist measures also hurt developing countries trying to inter into the international trade markets.

Since World War II, International trade has gained a rapidly increasing speed due to sustained and high-speed economic development in the world. In other words, countries’ degrees of openness and total volumes of import and export have enormously increased. In this paper, I will focus on the effects of accession to the WTO on textile trade between China and U.S, test comparative advantage theory (the main idea is that, under some conditions, when two countries start free trade, a country will produce and export the good which is in comparative advantage due to lower opportunity cost). Because of textile industries’ labor-intensive property, as the country with the largest amount of labor force, China is likely to have a comparative advantage in textile production. Therefore, it can be reasonable to conjecture that an increase in China’s export of textiles would occur after trade barrier eliminations on account of its WTO membership. In order to test my predictions, I will use regression analysis to test several variables such as Balassa Index (measure comparative advantages), Openness Index and total volume of textiles trade, then explore whether the WTO membership influences textile trade between these two countries.

Globalization has become one of the most influential forces in the twentieth century. International integration of world views, products, trade and ideas has caused a variety of states to blur the lines of their borders and be open to an international perspective. The merger of the Europeans Union, the ASEAN group in the Pacific and NAFTA in North America is reflective of the notion of globalized trade. The North American Free Trade Agreement was the largest free trade zone in the world at its conception and set an example for the future of liberalized trade. The North American Free Trade Agreement is coming into it's twentieth anniversary on January 1st, 2014. 1 NAFTA not only sought to enhance the trade of goods and services across

The international trade of goods across the world accounts for approximately 60% of the world Gross Domestic Product (The World Bank, 2014). A great proportion of goods transactions occur every second. The primary question is whether international trade benefits a country as an entirety, and, if so, why would a country implement protective trade policies to restrict particular exports? To address this question, this essay aims to explore the impact of trade on various economic stakeholders, including consumers, producers, labour and government and, furthermore, will compare models and theories with reality to ascertain the true winner/ loser in the international trade market.

To understand the comparison of protectionist rationales used in high-income countries with those used in low-income countries’ economies