"Carnival has ended." This is a statement Hans-Werner Sinn, an ace German economist and director of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research in Munich, has made to depict a recent round of the ebb to the outgoing economic prosperity. Meanwhile, the New York Times entitled its news analysis on this theme as "An End to the Good Times". When Western critics have sketched a grim perspective for the present world economy, we, too, should ponder it or mull carefully things behind the ebb tide of economic prosperity.
There have been absolutely no similar or identical, economic boom periods, and this round of prosperity has been stimulated by economic globalization. When the tide recedes, economists need to study and delve into the "financial virus," a virus nurtured by sub-prime mortgage crisis in the U.S., to see on what extent it has negatively "infected" the global economy.
A public opinion poll has shown that the number of people with a passive, negative attitude toward economic globalization is three times more than those adopting a positive attitude on it in the U.S., Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Spain, and the most direct outcome of such a trend of thought against economic globalization poses the aggravation or escalation of trade protection worldwide.
In the United States, presidential candidates pass themselves off as spokespersons of labor organizations. Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama, for example, committed to re-negotiating the North American Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Both Democratic contenders, however, have gone so far as to threaten to quit it if NAFTA fails to provide American workers with more esential guarantees.
In the European Union (EU), the trade protection has been infiltrated into regions where people have all along madly doted, worshipped and sought after free trade. Jose Manuel Durao Barroso, president of the European Commission, gave certain implications when he said that many EU member nations had regarded China's economic growth as a threat to them.
Nevertheless, the employment rate generally represents a thermometer of trade protectionism in Western nations. Men and women in the streets there are usually not so sensitive to statistics released by the US Federal Reserve and other related financial agencies or institutions. Instead, they are, as a matter of fact, most sensitive to volatile changes on labor markets.
Total US employment fell by 63,000 jobs in February, the second consecutive monthly decline and worst showing in five years, according to a Labor Department report released Monday or March 17, which has been quoted by the New York Times. These figures have filled working people with worries for their job security, and changes in opinions polls have begun with changes from the employment rate, and the year 2008 is a year of presidential campaigning in the U.S. Menaced by the possible economic recession, voters will likely be attracted by the trade protectionist policy, so that the ongoing presidential "election" could possibly shift from a "political showdown" into an "economics showdown."
At a time when the United States, a leading global propeller of the free trade, has lost its momentum for rapid economic development, the world trade will possibly be subjected to a severe test from "sailing against the current". In a global trade setup that has lost its equilibrium, a test against possible economic recession is limited not merely to the capabilities for coordination and responses of countries in both upper and lower streams but the affordability of those countries at the down stream. So, a sense of urgency is all the more eminent and pressing, and it comprises not only affordability at both political and economic sectors but technological and psychological preparations as well to cope with it.
By People's Daily Online, and its author is Ding Gang, a senior PD desk editor
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