Is Free Trade Fair? Essay

Words: 2993
Pages: 12

1. Is free trade fair?

You will need to explain what free trade is, which trade theories seek to explain free trade, and whether you assess free trade to be fair. You must use examples to support your arguments.

1) benefits
2) costs + criticisms
3)case study
4)member states
5)non member states
6) case study
7) yes or no
Introduction
Free trade as defined by Hill (2009) implies that a country and its citizens can purchase goods from another country or produce and sell goods to another country without any government influence in the form of quotas, tariffs or duties. There are many theories explaining free trade, from Adam Smith’s theory of absolute advantage in 1776 to the new trade theory in the 1970s. As more and more
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Such a scenario depicts free trade as unfair because developed nations have been able to export to the markets of many nations to achieve high growth in the past, and now developing nations want to maximize their opportunities of free trade in the markets of developed nations as well. According to Sen (2005) the WTO’s continued promises to developing countries of greater market access to key industries like agriculture, clothing and textiles are still yet to materialize. Developed nations still seek to restrict imports from countries that may provide fierce competition in the textile industry, like China. Developing nations have also been trying very hard to utilize the dispute settlement process of the WTO to complain about the abuse of antidumping policies in developed nations, with limited success (Bown & McCulloch, 2010). The trade distortion in the global agriculture and cotton industry is further analyzed in sections below.
Agricultural trade distortion(con)
Agriculture forms a vital part of the economies of many developing nations. About 70 percent of people in poor nations depend on agriculture for a living (Devadoss, 2006). The developed and rich nations’ high domestic export subsidies for farmers and import tariffs for foreign agriculture products