Let nations trade

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: Globalisation is a much punched bag; the xenophobic traits that all humans possess in some measure actually encourage such punching. Yet most people and the many anti-globalisation bodies they form do not realise that the world and they themselves would be much better off if their punches had been directed elsewhere.

A wonderful actor might be involved in a flop; the problem in most cases is with the plot and sometimes the insipid co-star. Sensible producers still continue to line up outside his door armed with better plots and promises to hire more competent actresses.

Such sensible producers offer a contrast to anti-globalisers who despite the association of trade with rising affluence in many parts of the world focus only on cases where it has been associated with deepening deprivation and indebtedness. They also forget to examine the often naughty and defaulting hand maidens of liberalisation — infrastructure, governance and human capital formation — but take the easy way out to blame liberalisation itself.

All of us trade without realising it. People like me sell our human capital services or skilled labour for a monthly salary. With our salaries we satisfy our varied need for services (that of a cook, a chauffeur, a barber etc) and commodities (food items, durables etc). This in effect is trade in the same sense as that which occurs between nations: we trade our skilled labour for all the items we need. Nobody deters individuals from trading. In fact their very survival depends upon the ability to trade. None of us living in this modern age can even think of producing the hundreds of commodities that we use every month, from staid trash bags to fragrant shaving cream, on our own.

Moreover, despite trade among individuals, there are poor people just as we have poor nations in an interlocked trading world. Most people are poor because they cannot offer anything that is valued by others. The illiterate villager, crowded out of his land by the multiplication of his kith and kin, might have nothing to offer to other rural or urban dwellers and finds himself condemned to poverty.