Gordon Hanson Interviewed on American Public Media's Marketplace
The downsides to trade with China
09/27/2011
Kai Ryssdal,
American Public Media: Marketplace
Kai Ryssdal: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said today he's going to bring a bill to the floor in the Senate next week that goes after Beijing for manipulating its currency. Just the latest indicator that there are those in Washington and elsewhere who say we're not getting all we could from our trading relationship with China.
Gordon Hanson is an economist at the University of California, San Diego whose most recent research says exactly that. Good to have you with us.
Gordon Hanson: My pleasure to be with you, Kai.
Ryssdal: Conventional wisdom has it that trade is, in essence, good, and trade with China, while painful, is positive. And you're not disputing that, but there's a downside here that we haven't really thought about.
Hanson: There is, and it's something that economists have been uncovering slowly over time; it doesn't often get a great deal of attention because people like to tell the good news story about international trade, but there are consequences for workers who are in the front line of international competition.
Click here to read the full transcript.
Related Links
Gordon Hanson is director of the Center on Emerging and Pacific Economies and professor of economics at UC San Diego, where he holds faculty positions in the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies and the Department of Economics. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a co-editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics. Prior to joining UCSD in 2001, he was on the economics faculty at the University of Michigan (1998-2001) and at the University of Texas (1992-1998).
