Ballad of the global worker

摘要

As america's continuing debates over NAFTA, trade with China, trade with Japan and trade with the EU show, trade policy is the most politically sensitive of all the issues raised by globalisation. The effects of international market forces on taxes, public spending, financial markets and supranational governance are all rather subtle compared with their effect (at least as people perceive it) on jobs and wages. And if globalisation is tending, however slightly, to reduce the capacity of the state when it comes to taxes and spending, it is enlarging the demands on the state when it comes to the labour market. That is why some argue that capitalism is heading for a crisis similar to that of the 1930s: the gap between what it can do and what it must do is growing intolerably wide.