It is now widely accepted by the press and the public that greater integration into the global world-economy brings with it downward pressure on workers' wages. At the same time, globalization is thought to increase the profits of large corporations. In fact, there is little scientific evidence that globalization, measured in terms of international trade, has these effects. This study will examine the effects of trade globalization on a broad panel of countries from all segments of the world-economy. It is designed to determine whether or not the effects of trade globalization on individual countries depend on types of countries it trades with (core vs. periphery) and the direction of that trade (imports vs. exports). Based on sociological world-systems theory, it is expected that higher levels of imports from countries in the peripheries of the world-economy will have a strong negative impact on core countries, but reverse flows will not harm economies in the peripheries. This hypothesis, along with alternative hypotheses based on neoclassical economic theory and dependency theory, will be tested statistically using data from the International Monetary Fund's Direction of Trade Statistics and the World Bank's World Development Indicators. The result will be the first broadly cross-national test of some influential popular notions about the harmfulness of trade globalization.
Broader impacts. The theoretical and methodological innovations introduced in this project will improve future research on and public understanding of the effects of trade globalization. An early product of this project will be the publication of a Disaggregated Trade Flow Database (DTFD), which will become a general data resource for anyone interested in understanding the trade structure of the world-economy. The DTFD will help answer questions about the composition of US and other countries' trade flows by trade partners' positions in the world-economy. Undergraduate and graduate student assistants will play key roles in the creation and maintenance of the DTFD, promoting the training of a new generation of researchers. More broadly, the results of this study will be useful for US trade policy formation by helping foster an understanding of the differential effects of trade between the US and partners occupying different locations in the global world-economy.
