Economy and rights

With the Pacific agreement to move to free trade, the United States has made important progress in a cause that it has vigorously supported for half a century.

Trade has contributed mightily to rising prosperity in this country and throughout the world. But the meeting in Indonesia also heard, less eagerly, about another longstanding American cause, human rights, that most Asian governments consider unrelated to economics.

Americans do not consider them unrelated and are uneasy about close commercial relations with despotisms. That will be, necessarily and properly, a continuing source of tension in the trade alliance that is now taking shape as the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. The American government will continue to try to link trade and human rights where it can.

To the extent that it succeeds, it will confront authoritarian Asian governments with hard choices between economic growth and self-protection.

And exactly what do these 18 governments mean by free trade? So far they haven't defined the term. Japan and the United States, which have been quarreling bitterly over it for decades, clearly don't agree. Whether China would agree with the American concept of free trade -- let alone the American concept of human rights -- is hardly a question.

President Clinton has done a fine job of persuading the other Pacific countries to work toward wider trade, incoming as well as outbound. He now faces the harder job of persuading voters here. The bill embodying the last big international trade agreement is anything but ensured of passage by Congress.

A lot of Americans regard trade and foreign imports as a threat. Clinton spoke directly to that anxiety in his Jakarta press conference: "Even if more jobs are coming into the economy, people may not feel more personal job security. Even if the economy is growing with low inflation, people may not get a raise."

He went on to say that there are only three ways to remedy that. One is to increase the proportion of high-wage jobs and that's what trade does, by rewarding productivity. Another is to increase the level of skills among American workers to enable them to take advantage of those better jobs. A third is to steer investment and enterprise toward isolated areas, such as the inner cities and rural regions.

Numbers 2 and 3 require active government intervention. That's going to be hard to deliver in a time when the tide is running strongly in the opposite direction.

-- The Washington Post