≡ Menu

Quotation of the Day…

is from page 103 of Jagdish Bhagwati’s 2002 book, Free Trade Today (original emphasis):

[T]here is a danger that excessive use of the language of concessions in trade bargaining can lead, and has indeed led, to a widespread bureaucratic and political acceptance of the wrongheaded view that import liberalization is expensive rather than gainful and must be offset by concessions for one’s exports. This, in turn, has fed the popular protectionist misconception that trade is good but imports are bad! Evidently, such a viewpoint does create difficulties for trade liberalization: as George Orwell would have reminded us, language matters. And as we scholars believe, sloppy arguments have a tendency to come back at us; we may win battles that way but may lose the war.

Comments