WTO on 'Making Globalization Socially Sustainable'

There is already a towering amount of reading material on the subject matter out there, but for what it's worth, the WTO and ILO have prepared a new publication on the theme of Making Globalization Socially Sustainable. In a way, it's a helpful step being taken by the WTO in understanding its critics' concerns about matters such as trade liberalization. Instead of emphasizing principles of comparative advantage ad infinitum, acknowledging that gains and losses are unevenly distributed and that these differences help explain varying appetites for, say, completing multilateral trade deals, may be an avenue worth exploring. Contributors here include Dani Rodrik and others who've explored these themes in their previous work. From the press blurb:

“Making Globalization Socially Sustainable” underlines globalization’s potential to stimulate productivity and growth but highlights the importance of pursuing trade, employment and social policies together in order to harness this potential. The book contains contributions from leading academic experts who analyse the various channels through which globalization affects jobs and wages...

The publication reasserts the positive role that trade liberalization can play in improving efficiency and thus growth. It emphasizes the important role for governments in investing in public goods and in strengthening the functioning of markets that are crucial for globalization to be growth-enhancing. The key role of social protection is highlighted, as is the need to adjust social protection systems to local conditions...

The publication highlights three challenges faced by policy-makers as they seek to ensure the social sustainability of globalization. First, the structure and levels of employment resulting from increased openness can be more or less favourable to the labour force and to economic growth. Second, openness — while helping to offset domestic difficulties — can increase the vulnerability of domestic labour markets to external factors, as witnessed during the Great Recession. Third, the gains from globalization are not distributed equally and some workers and firms may lose in the short and even medium term. The authors of this book discuss policy responses to these three challenges.