Challenges to the Global Trading System: Adjustment to Globalization in the Asia-Pacific Region (review)

The Pacific Trade and Development (PAFTAD) Conference series since 1968 is rightly celebratory in its thirtieth volume of twenty-four chapters in long and short essays by thirty-one-strong academic, policy and business practitioners. The editors' opening chapter reveals a self-deprecating quote of Charles Dickens' "the best of times … the worst of times" for international trade.

It critiques free trade in two principal threads. One is unsurprising, namely, trade is a flawed policy because the real world is always one of even negotiators and negotiations. Two is globalization as the ultimate villain; no surprises again as any contemporary trade volume doubles as one on globalization.

The layperson often wonders why economists theorize from unattainable ideals when the real world is not. Students wonder why they study textbook cases laboriously to find they are in a different world when they graduate to work as policy-makers and business practitioners. All lament about perfect tools ill suited to the imperfect world. Unlike most engineers or doctors, economists do not seem to be able to fix problems as easily.

Any PAFTAD volume adds value to communicate and educate the less academic readers on this apparent chasm or disconnect as PAFTAD has business stakeholders as its clients. This volume comprises a first part of longer scholarly papers, which revisits old issues with new topics. The academic papers include new challenges to the global trading system and policy, globalization fatigue, political economy of free trade agreements (FTAs), Sino-U.S. relations, the environment, outsourcing, intellectual property right (IPR), Asia-Pacific interdependence, and security.

A fresh chapter on "intra-mediate" trade variously noted elsewhere by others reflect on the nuances of location–globalization, spatial–cross ownership, including holding companies, intra-firm and invisible knowledge-based economy transactions. China as encircling the traditional triad to rearrange the geoeconomics and geopolitics especially of the United States, old and new security threats to affect fundamentals in sovereignty and finance are exemplary chapters of how PAFTAD goes beyond the old chestnut. More insights from the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as social stakeholders as already observed in many chapters are as salutary.

No contemporary trade literature can miss welfare concerns to realize the same non-level playing field in free trade and income distribution. Theory remains a useful handle, but as noted in the chapters on externalities, globalization and trade have messy collateral damages. It takes more than wishful platitudes and esoteric computable general equilibrium (CGE) models on FTAs to bring some acceptable levels in both playing fields.

To preserve sustainability, one wonders if a more practical encouragement of capitalistic environmental companies may result in a cleaner safer planet. More localized products to meet traditional, cultural and religious preferences from hospitality to medical products however globalized and dispersed may still create some local jobs while losing some to outsourcing. The PAFTAD experts with local knowledge and anecdotes can reinvent the PAFTAD contribution with more practical corporate stories as much as academic principles and models feed the intellectually inclined.

The second part of the volume appears to recognize that scholarly chapters need to be supplemented and complemented by shorter perspectives from the policy, and business and academic authors. Accordingly, from policy-makers and policy executives as eminent as a minister and a diplomat to policy advisers and academic professors field their views. A sharper focus on what can be built into larger PAFTAD projects and communication to the basic stakeholders is, however, missing.

The practitioner contributors range from Indonesia to Iceland in the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) besides the United States. The business perspective seems balanced by the academic and corporate authors on new globalization, with California, Hawaii, and Singapore as case studies. The academic perspectives have more on globalization and its adjustment to management of WTO negotiations. A warning is of East Asian FTAs replicating or innovatively recreating U.S. FTAs as a potential for...