Economy and rights

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