Gordon Hanson Study on U.S.-China Competition Cited in New York Times
Behind the New View of Globalization
08/29/2012
Edward Alden,
New York Times
For decades, economists resisted the conclusion that trade – for all of its many benefits — has also played a significant role in job loss and the stagnation of middle-class incomes in the United States. As recently as 2008, for instance, Robert Lawrence of Harvard, one of the country’s most respected trade experts, concluded that trade explained only a small share of growing income inequality and labor market displacement in the United States.
Rather than focusing on trade, economists argued that other factors – especially “skill-biased technical change,” technological innovation that puts an added premium on skilled workers – played the biggest role in holding down middle-class wages. But now economists are beginning to change their minds. Responding to The Times’s recent survey about the causes of income stagnation, many top economists have cited globalization as a leading cause.
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Gordon Hanson is director of the Center on Emerging and Pacific Economies and professor of economics at UC San Diego. He specializes in the economics of international trade, international migration, and foreign direct investment. He has published extensively in the top academic journals of the economics discipline, is widely cited for his research by scholars across the social sciences, and is frequently quoted in major media outlets. His current research examines the international migration of skilled labor, border enforcement and illegal immigration, the impact of imports from China on the US labor market, and the determinants of comparative advantage.
