The vaunted merits of globalisation are being hotly debated in the United States, long considered the home of open-market capitalism, amid fears that free trade is boosting inequality.
Presidential candidate, Senator Hillary Clinton, has voiced concern about global free-trade negotiations, but New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has called for America to resist protectionist urges.
Clinton, whose husband, former US president Bill Clinton, signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) into law, has said she would take a "hard look" at free-trade negotiations if elected president.
The 2008 White House hopeful says she is an admirer of a US winner of the Nobel economics prize, Paul Samuelson, who says Americans do not automatically benefit from free trade.
"I agree with Paul Samuelson, the very famous economist, who has recently spoken and written about how comparative advantage as it is classically understood may not be descriptive of the 21st century economy in which we find ourselves," Clinton said in a recent article in the Financial Times newspaper.
Samuelson, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former economic advisor to then-president John F. Kennedy, believes the benefits of free trade can erode when trading partners get to a comparable level of development. He has also questioned whether the United States will benefit over the long term from its trading partnership with rising Asian powerhouse China. The United States currently has a bulging 26-billion-dollar trade deficit with China. The relationship has created economic challenges for Washington and been fiercely criticised by some US lawmakers.
Clinton's campaign website criticises globalisation for "generating rising income inequality." While some Democratic politicians are expressing concerns, free-trade supporters argue that globalisation has boosted prosperity.
Bloomberg wrote an editorial in the past week praising free trade as having created vast economic opportunities and warning Amercian policymakers not to erect protectionist walls.
Concern, though, has emerged from surprising quarters.
Robert Zoellick, the new president of the World Bank, referred to the negative aspects of globalisation during one of his first keynote speeches. "The global flow of trade has more than doubled since 1990," the former US Trade Representative said in mid-October, adding "yet many remain on the fringes and some are falling further behind." The World Bank's sister institution, the International Monetary Fund, recently issued a report saying: "Over the past two decades, income inequality has risen in most regions and countries." The IMF like the World Bank typically adheres to a free-trade orthodoxy. Analysts also disagree over whether globalisation has delivered all its promises.
"The mood in the country now is shifting so strongly against trade," said Edward Alden, a researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations.
"There is no question if you look at the opinion polling that Americans are considerably more skeptical about trade than they were when Bill Clinton was running for office, and it's got worse even again over the last five years," Alden said.
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