Global trades

In the class of global perspectives we had discussed global tread we were given a text...

Many of the manufactured goods purchased in Europe or North America are made in China or the Indian subcontinent. Sometimes this means that an item of clothing might cost more to repair, or even to dry clean, than it was to buy in the first place. For many electronic items, such as laptop computers or smartphones, the price of the individual product may be many times more than the monthly wage of the worker who assembled it.

Yet, especially for electronic devices purchased on contract, it can often make more financial sense for the consumer to throw it away after a couple of years in favour of a slightly upgraded model. Those discarded phones often end up back in the developing world, in vast waste dumps, where the metals and chemicals used in their manufacture slowly pollute the environment and make people sick. 

based on this text we have to answer some questions..

 

Do you consider these sorts of relationships to be an inevitable part of global trade?

 I have two positions about the question. On the one hand I think it is inevitable and on the other it is avoidable. What I think is that it varies according to the country or the company. For example, huge companies prefer to establish workers to cheap labor and their salary is less than the product they are offering, however not because they can not afford the cost of paying more money to them, since I believe they got the money to do it, because it would be more expensive. So my view is they didn't want to. Also, I believe that these companies hire humble people or people that need the job, so it doesn't matter how much they pay to them since they need the money. They took advantage of this people.

 However, on the other hand, what I believe is that there are countries or companies, such as Argentina, where it is inevitable. Because they can't afford it. Argentina has the goods to product although it don't have the machinery to do it, so they need another country. 

What I believe is that in the most developed countries this is avoidable. Eventought in the undeveloped countries it is inevitable.

Should factors such as the environment, human health, or the gap between rich and poor play a greater role in international relations, whatever the cost?

I hardly believe those factors should play a greater role in international relations. I think workers' rights are not taken into account, which I consider the most important issue. Companies only/main concern is to earn more and more money, but do not take into account the people who are working, or the environment they are destroying. That same environment where they live, thanks to everything they do, pollution has increased a lot, with several consequences.

What is your own opinion about the issue?
I believe that behind every company there is a huge amount of money that is incredibly difficult to fight against. The world advanced in such a way where people have no rights, where most people do not care about the environment or the people working. I believe we help this companies to grow everyday. If people stopped buying this, it could stop happening. Smaller markets would help, where things are manufactured in the same country. They may not be of the same quality, but this would help both the workers and the environment.

What more can you find out about this issue? Make a summary of  the different opinions you find. 

Josh Bivens (from the article Negative Effects of World Trade) writes that international trade creates jobs for exporting industries but eliminates them in other sectors, as cheaper foreign goods displace domestic products. Job losses are especially high in manufacturing. Noting an increase in the United States’ trade deficit, EPI reported a net job loss in the U.S. economy because job losses stemming from imported goods have exceeded jobs created by exports. Job quality is a related negative effect of world trade. Noting the disproportionate effect on manufacturing, Bivens writes that jobs in this sector generally pay higher salaries and better benefits, even for workers without a college education.

 An article from the Blizfluent magazine "For garment manufacturing, production costs include labor, the complexity of the garments, cost of fabric and freight. With shorter distances from U.S. textile mills to Mexican garment assembly plants, lower freight costs in the Western Hemisphere can help offset lower labor costs in Asia; therefore jeans manufactured in Mexico from American denim may cost less than Chinese-made jeans using the same denim."

An article from the magazine voz "China is loaning trillions of dollars to countries willing to host these projects. They’re promoted as a win-win for everyone. Many of the countries involved need new infrastructure and access to new markets, while China needs new projects for its growing construction industry. But many of the countries involved in the BRI are authoritarian, corrupt, and in conflict"

Jeffrey Frankel is Harpel Professor of Capital Formation and Growth at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. 
"Trade has some of its effects through the channel of accelerating economic growth, because trade contributes to growth analogously to investment, technological progress, and so on. Although growth is bad for air and water pollution at the initial stages of industrialization, later on it reduces pollution as coun- tries become rich enough to pay to clean up their environ- ments.
The report Environmental Effects of International Trade considers whether globalisation has damaged environmen- tal goals. Empirical studies of cross-country data generally find no detrimental effects of trade on some measures of environmental degradation such as local SO2 (sulphur di- oxide) air pollution, controlling for income. The evidence does suggest that trade and growth can exacerbate other measures of environmental degradation, however, particu- larly CO2 emissions (carbon dioxide). Increasingly, people living in one country want to protect the air, water, forests, and animals not just in their own countries, but also in other countries as well. But no single country can address global environmental problems on its own, due to the free rider problem. While there is a role for unilateral actions on climate change, in the long term multilateral action of- fers the only hope of addressing the problem."