Global Trade – Ivan Torres

The Path we Should Follow in Global Trade” Free market

At the very beginning of the moment I was thinking in my posture for this essay, I have to say that it was easy to say one of the two options, but after analyzing deeply these two postures of “free market” and “protectionism” I was able to see pros and cons of both of them and I entered in an own conflict of which was my own posture.

What really gave me an excellent idea of my posture was precisely the term of “distance” that we analyzed in the different research sources presented for this unit. Depending on my own “distance” as a mexican I know that right now free market is giving us good opportunities, and it has help our own economy and world participation, but I also think that we have to restructure some things about this trades and global participation.

“Globalization is no global”, this is one of the main ideas that called my attention, we all depend on each other, that would be beautiful, and thinking in my own country, I think that not all my country is part of globalization, and this is also because free market trades and globalization had not the whole respect that we deserve. We depend a lot of other countries and mostly from the United States, and we are really good clients for them. Even-though we “share a border with the United States, has vast oil, copper, and iron reserves, and its market share in the United States is about 5%”.

Free market talks about globalization and our new free trade with US and Canada “involves more than 2 billion dollars” but, does that mean that it is fair for all? This would be my first step to free market, to analyze really carefully all the exports, imports, and global situation of my own country’s economy, and how our own richness is exploited vs how our people is living in our country. For our own people free market could be an excellent tool to have better lives, but right now we are not using it in the best possible way, we are more interested as culture to be part of a US culture than to our own culture, and that’s another idea I was interested to say, I support free market, but not forgetting that it will be used as a tool for people not as a tool to always adapt everyone and everything to the world’s trends. You can actually see it on KFC example in one of the documents, we are not the biggest fast food consumers, but depending on our distance, we are an excellent opportunity for this specific market, and as I was telling, we want to be part of it.

I really think that the different richness of every country around the world are not well exploited for a real world benefit, and that’s the idea we have to change. How can we explain that China has more market share with the U.S. than Mexico, well they are using their free trade in a really good way. We have to learn from these kind of countries in order to have a real “global” trade which can involve the richness of every country but also helping these richness and markets with competition. We have to increase global economic growth, but also taking care of the details, like not having poor job conditions. If we are really part of globalization, this should not happen, equality should rule this specific part of globalization.

Thanks to free market we have a lot of opportunities right now in my country, the only idea I’m trying to express through this essay is that we have to reanalyze how we are doing it and also adapt it to today’s market, but never giving up on our own cultural richness. We now depend a lot on other countries and our exports are not bad, but I think we have to take advantage of our own richness and try to export more, depending, yes on other countries, but having the certainty that we have essential things for the world and that can give them better lives and also to us and our families.

After reviewing also the data that the world of economics present us we also can see that we need to work a lot in free trade if we actually want to include everyone, we can see this in the example of my own country “The top import origins of Mexico are The U.S. (181B), China (52.1B), Germany (14.9B), Japan (12.8B) and South Korea (10.9B). The top export destinations of Mexico are the U.S. (307B), Canada (22B), China (8.98B), Germany (8.83B) and Japan (5.57B)”. Free trade is helping us but I want to include as I said before, all the different markets around the world, it seems to be a free market of the big 10 or 20 around the world, but we have more than 190 countries in the world. I support free market because I know that this could help us to grow and also to learn about each other, the only things that I should probably review about this posture is to see how to really include everyone and make it a free market.

Research sources:

• BBC News Mundo. (2018). 3 diferencias entre el TCLAN y el T-MEC, el nuevo acuerdo comercial entre Estados Unidos, México y Canadá. 10/02/19, de BBC News Mundo Sitio web: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-45708029

• Pedro Belli. (1991). Globalizing the rest of the world. Harvard Business Review, 91402, 8.

• Pankaj Ghemawat. (September 2001). Distance Still Matters. Harvard Business Review, 13.