Jagdish Bhagwati Quotes

Under the guise of trade deals and trade agreements, its [free trade] really been used to keep workers in the world suppressed in terms of their wages or qualities of life.

We are told that we must open up, that trade and commerce must be totally free. Free for whom? For rogue speculators. For anarchists wanting to destroy weak countries in their crusade for open societies, to force us to submit to the dictatorship of international manipulators.

The countries of the Middle East have been losers in the age of globalization, out of step in an age of free markets, free trade, and democratic politics.

In the field of economy, for instance, we … members of the developing world follow the currents of globalization, with conditions set by the rich countries, and at a speed dictated without our slightest input.

Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular.

We have quit discussing the tariff, and have turned our attention to getting trade wherever it can be found.

Belief in the panacea-like qualities of free trade amounts to ‘collective insanity’.

Fast track is about pushing through the TPP, TTIP and future trade agreements that would massively increase the power of big international corporations and affect the daily lives of Americans.

NAFTA and GATT are quite similar. They both have highly protectionist elements. They're kind of a mixture of liberalization and protection designed to expand the power of transnational corporations. They're very basically investor's rights agreements. One crucial part in both is the "intellectual property right," which is a funny way of saying that corporations, like pharmaceutical companies, will have near-monopolistic rule over future technology. This now includes product as well as process rights.

Let me say at the outset that I do not reflexively oppose international trade.

Now, given the experience that we have had thus far, with our subsequent trade agreements with NAFTA and others, you would think that with our experience of job loss that we have had there that when you find yourself in a hole that you might stop digging.

The Bush Administration and the Congress have to stop ignoring this crisis in international trade. The longer we ignore it, the more American jobs will move overseas. It's just that simple.

Globalization creates economic policies where the transnationals lord over us, and the result is misery and unemployment.

Governments have been ceding power to big multinational corporations in the market. We see the manifest in a variety of ways. Where governments are giving up power to big international institutions like the World Trade Organization or NAFTA, which are disabling governments' ability to protect the rights of their own people.

Before we move forward with new efforts to lower the barriers to international free trade, we must review the consequences of the policies of the past and address the problems of the present.

Capitalism has only hurt Latin America.

We are on pace this year to have a trade deficit that is larger than $800 billion. We have never faced that before, but we continue to put forward trade agreements like these that leave us naked to competition that is neither free nor fair.

I support the view that free trade in goods and services is a win-win situation. I'm not so convinced that free flows of capital without restriction is a win-win situation.

Public protests against globalization - protests that occur by and large in the prosperous West - denounce free trade and the mobility of capital as instruments of exploitation and oppression.

Trade agreements have always been greased about deception of who benefits. Now they are failing because leaders have come to believe their own lies.

Governments should not meddle with these trade issues… if we believe in free markets, then they have to be free

These agreements should be free trade. They aren’t free trade.

In general the principle of the World Trade Organization … is that sovereignty and democratic rights have to be subordinated to the rights of investors

Most globalism opposition groups believe “that the foreign trade policy- making process was undemocratic and that it elevated global concerns over domestic ones.” Non-elected bureaucrats working largely behind closed doors were responsible for setting international trade rules that affected agriculture, services, trade-related investment measures, intellectual trade in goods; and over-saw a binding international dispute settlement process with little (if any) input from the domestic citizens and groups who would be affected by these economic rules and political mechanisms.

The World Trade Organization is a fearful instrument of re-colonialization and exploitation