Fraser Institute launches new research centre for globalization studies
Contact:
Fred McMahon, Director, Centre for Globalization Studies
The Fraser Institute 688-0221, ext. 569,
Email fredm@fraserinstitute.ca
For Release: 14 November 2001
VANCOUVER, BC— The Fraser Institute announced today the creation of a new Centre for Globalization Studies. The announcement was made at a Fraser Institute luncheon in Toronto featuring Bill Emmott, editor of The Economist magazine.
The Centre will be devoted to bringing accurate, well-researched information on globalization—the opening of borders to the freer flow of goods services, ideas, and information—to the general public. The Centre will focus attention on trade in the Americas, particularly the question of a North American perimeter.
"Canada is trading nation," says the Centre's director, Fred McMahon. "It is vitally important to our future prosperity to bring accurate information to the debate on trade and globalization. We see stories all the time about increasing poverty, child labour, environmental degradation, and rising inequality—all blamed on globalization and all simply not true."
Research from a number of sources shows that:
Incomes are rising in nations that open their borders and adopt market reforms.
Incomes of rich and poor alike share in the increased prosperity, with the evidence suggesting that inequality is decreasing in developing nations that open their borders.
Child labour is lowest in market-oriented trading economies.
Trade improves environmental quality and environmental regulation because of the new cleaner technologies that trade brings and because rising prosperity increases the taste and the means for environmental improvement.
Trading nations increase their spending on social programs.
"The research is readily available and comes from many sources—leading universities, international organizations like the United Nations, and research institutes," McMahon notes. "Yet, it is virtually ignored or distorted while the charges against globalization, which usually have no empirical support from peer-reviewed research, are cited as facts."
For example, anti-globalists often claim inequality is rising. To the extent this is true, it’s because those nations that keep their borders closed and refuse market reforms continue to fall behind the rest of the world. "The inequality numbers, which are often distorted into an argument against globalization, are actually an argument for trade and globalization since it is in non-trading nations that people’s lives are getting worse," says McMahon.
More than economics hangs on the debate. This is the second modern era of globalization. The first lasted from the mid-19th century to the early 20th century and contributed to an unusually peaceful era in European history. The same special interests, nationalists groups, and international uncertainty that threaten globalization today undermined it a century ago.
"Academics often agree on little but there is near universal agreement that the demise of the first era of globalization contributed to the horrors that followed in the first half of the 20th century," McMahon notes.
With the end of globalization’s first era, closed borders and declining wealth replaced the free flow of goods and information. Suspicion replaced cross border links. "It would be a great tragedy if at the beginning of the 21st century we repeat the mistakes from the beginning of the 20th century," says McMahon.
McMahon's work has won the Sir Antony Fisher International Memorial Award for advancing public policy and has been short-listed for the Donner Canadian public policy award. He has consulted on economic development in South America and prepared research, by invitation, for the United Nations high-level experts group on international development.
The Fraser Institute has devoted considerable work to the topic of international trade. The Institute is the lead institute in the research and publication of the Economic Freedom of the World Index, one of the most remarkable endeavors in economics. The design of the Index involved over 100 leading thinkers, including several Nobel Laureates. The Fraser Institute also played a key role in the debate leading up to NAFTA.
Established in 1974, The Fraser Institute is an independent public policy organization based in Vancouver with offices in Calgary and Toronto.