The Future of Global Trade Policy

T he onward march of globalisation is among the greatest economic and political stories of our era. Behind globalisation lie both deliberate policies of liberalisation and the revolution in communications and information technology. The latter, in turn, has allowed the emergence of integrated systems of production and distribution, managed by a new breed of global companies. The most important economic and political consequence of contemporary globalisation has been the " great convergence " of average incomes between the high-income countries of today and the emerging countries. As Arvind Subramaniam and Martin Kessler note, in an important recent paper: " Until the late 1990s, only about 30 per cent of the developing world (21 of 72 countries) was catching up with the economic frontier (the US), and the rate of catch-up was about 1.5 per cent per capita per year. Since the late 1990s, nearly three-quarters of the developing world (75 of 1033 countries) started catching