Here Comes The Hard Sell On The Transpacific Partnership Agreement [View all]

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From Time today:

Voters Won’t Like It, but We Have to Bring Back Free Trade

There was a time, not that long ago, when policymakers and economists didn’t dare question free trade. The open exchange of clothes, cars, oranges, TV sets and everything else was almost universally upheld as a rock-solid route to prosperity. But over the past decade, free trade suffered a near death experience. The whole concept became a whipping boy for all sorts of economic evils. Workers, especially in advanced economies, blamed free trade for job losses to emerging nations and downward pressure on wages.

While it’s true that not everybody gains equally from free trade, there is no shortage of evidence that eliminating barriers to the flow of goods and services is beneficial for economies overall — boosting exports, enhancing efficiency and reducing prices for consumers. But tell that to angry voters. In one 2012 survey, more than half of respondents in the U.S. believed the country should either renegotiate or pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), even though it had gone into effect 18 years earlier.

Politicians took note. Republicans and Democrats may not agree on much these days, but some have reached across the aisle in recent years to call for the repeal of NAFTA. Many governments soured on approving new pacts. A free-trade agreement between the U.S. and South Korea took four years to ratify. International efforts to bring down trade barriers also stalled. The Doha Round of trade talks, which started in 2001 through the World Trade Organization, broke down over bitter differences between developed and developing nations. Doubts emerged that the deal could ever get done.



Free trade, though, has unexpectedly sprung back to life, with U.S. President Barack Obama wielding the defibrillator. In a reversal of his previous hesitance — he too once expressed anti-NAFTA sentiments — Obama is pressing hard for a couple of wide-ranging trade deals that would be the most important in two decades. Long-awaited negotiations began in July for a trade agreement between the U.S. and E.U., which would knit together countries with nearly half the world’s GDP into a massive free-trade zone. On the other side of the world, the U.S. is also pushing for the completion of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade pact that would include nations as far-flung as New Zealand, Peru and Malaysia. These deals, if finalized, “would change the entire trade landscape,” says Bruce Stokes, director of the global-economic-attitudes program at the Pew Research Center in Washington.

http://business.time.com/2013/09/17/voters-wont-like-it-but-we-have-to-bring-back-free-trade/