If more developing countries are to benefit more from trade liberalization, we need a fairer trade regime; and if more people are to benefit from trade liberalization, we need to manage trade liberalization better. The United States should move toward a more comprehensive agenda for fairer trade and better-managed trade liberalization.² This agenda will ensure that the fruits of trade are shared by both the poor and the rich, in both the developing and developed countries. Without it, we should not be surprised about the backlash we are seeing, both in the United States and abroad.

 

Joseph E. Stiglitz is University Professor at Columbia University. He served as the chief economist of the World Bank from 1997 to 2000. He is the author of Making Globalization Work (W. W. Norton, 2006), and most recently, with Linda Bilmes of Harvard's Kennedy School, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Costs of the Iraq Conflict (W. W. Norton, 2008).

 

¹In my book with Andrew Charlton, Fair Trade for All (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2005), we describe in more detail what this regime would look like.

²I explain this agenda further in my book Making Globalization Work (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).

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