Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

"Taken together, the exchange of goods, people, ideas, and cultures made the world much richer."

"Third, the redistribution of gains from trade has proven extremely tricky, and people negatively affected by trade have suffered, and are still suffering, a great deal."

"removing trade barriers is not enough to ensure new countries can join the party. Declaring trade is free is not the magic bullet for development (or even for trade)."

"Second, while the gains are potentially much larger for smaller and poorer countries, there is no magic bullet."

"First, the gains of international trade are fairly small for a large economy like that of the United States."

"Poor internal integration also makes economies sticky, eliminating the gains from international trade for the common men and women, or even turning them into losses."

"But firms can only be large if the market is large."

"The problem of course is that small is not beautiful. A minimum scale is required to allow firms to employ specialized workers or to use high-productivity machines."

"Large economies like the United States and China have the skills and the capital to produce most things at a very high level of efficiency somewhere in the country. Moreover, their internal markets are large enough to absorb production from many factories in many sectors operating at the appropriate scale. They would lose relatively little by not trading."

"Simply put, despite its openness to trade, the US import share (8 percent) is one of the lowest in the world."

"the aggregate gains from trade, for a large economy like the United States, are actually quantitatively quite small. The truth is, if the US were to go back to complete autarky, not trading with anybody, it would be poorer. But not that much poorer."

"Indeed, after the adoption of the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare), disability claims increased by 1 percent in states that refused to expand Medicaid, while they decreased by 3 percent in expansion states."

"So not only did the United States not come close to compensating the workers who lost out, but what little help people could get through the existing social protection apparatus seemed designed to make them feel denigrated."

"In the United States, those who join the disability rolls rarely leave them, partly because being classified as disabled hurts their employment prospects."

"the most physically demanding jobs were those that typically disappeared. Some workers were undoubtedly depressed; for others, disability insurance became a strategy they had to adopt to survive. Either way, unfortunately, going to disability is usually a one-way street out of employment."

"Even though they clearly overestimated the extent to which the market would take care of those directly affected by trade, trade theorists have always known some people would get hurt. Their response has always been that since many people do benefit, we should be willing and able to compensate those who are negatively affected."

"This is not a reason to try to prevent clustering, since the gains from clustering are potentially very large, but a warning to be willing to step in and deal with what happens when the cluster unravels."

"The disappearance of these amenities, the dearth of nice neighborhoods, and the catastrophic decline in the local tax base that makes it harder to provide water, schools, lights, and roads can eventually make an area so unattractive that it becomes impossible to revive. No new firm will want to move there to take the place of those that have died."

"Spain, Norway, and Germany all suffered similarly from the impact of the China shock. In each case the sticky economy became a sticky trap."

"Despite the fact that there were neighboring commuting zones essentially unaffected by the shock (and zones that actually benefitted, say, by importing certain components from China), workers did not move. The working-age population did not decline in the adversely affected commuting zones. They had no work."

"Those who lost their jobs tightened their belts, further reducing the economic activity in the area."

"Those zones more affected by the China shock experienced substantially larger reductions in manufacturing employment. More strikingly, there was no reallocation of labor to new kinds of jobs."

"What is surprising is how geographically concentrated the suffering ends up being. The left-behind people live in left-behind places."

"Even if export promotion did work for China— and it could have— the same strategy is unlikely to work for too many other countries, at least in the near future."

"On the other hand, it was at the expense of Chinese consumers who paid for those overvalued imports."

"This made it easier for them to afford to keep the dollar price of their exports low, which encouraged foreigners to buy Chinese, and thereby helped build the reputation of Chinese products. It also helped the exporters accumulate more capital and hire more new workers."

"Most observers believe China, for example, systematically undervalued its exchange rate throughout the 2000s (until about 2010) by selling renminbi and buying foreign currencies to keep its products artificially cheap against the competing products sold in dollars."

"Resources eventually moved and new products started being produced. And since existing producers benefitted from being able to import what they needed more easily, what they produced was of better quality and more saleable outside."

"The Italian maverick Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, once wrote: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum all manner of morbid symptoms appear.”"

"The Italian maverick Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, once wrote: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum all manner of morbid symptoms appear.”"