American Trade Policy: A Tragedy in the Making

This book is a study of the dangers to American productivity and living standards of the shift in recent years away from an open multilateral trading system toward bilateral trade agreements. The author is professor of economics, Stanford University, and 1996 president of the American economic Association. A summary of the book follows.
The increasing integration of the world economy has been a hallmark of economic advancement over the past two centuries. As costs of transport and communications have fallen, economic interactions between distant people, which were earlier limited to occasional shipments of low-volume, high-value goods, expanded first to trade in durable commodities, such as food-stuffs, and then to daily air shipments of specialized parts and components, and even perishable foods and fresh-cut flowers. As that has happened, the importance of the open multilateral trading system has increased; but, so too, has the visibility of foreign competition.