Paul Krugman, Columnist

What Economists (Including Me) Got Wrong About Globalization

The models that scholars used to measure the impact of exports from developing countries in the 1990s underestimated the effect on jobs and inequality.

October 10, 2019 at 10:00 AM UTC

By Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center and is a columnist for the New York Times. In 2008 he won the Nobel Prize in economics for his work on international trade and economic geography.

Trade mattered.
Photographer: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

This article is for subscribers only.

This column is adapted from a chapter in “Meeting Globalization’s Challenges” (Princeton University Press), a collection of papers by scholars who contributed to a conference at the International Monetary Fund on Oct. 11, 2017. The book will be published on Nov. 4.

Concerns about adverse effects from globalization aren’t new. As U.S. income inequality began rising in the 1980s, many commentators were quick to link this new phenomenon to another new phenomenon: the rise of manufactured exports from newly industrializing economies.