Mr Greenspan's statement on trade, technology and economic progress
Speech by the Chairman of the US Federal Reserve System, Mr Alan Greenspan, at the
Conference on International Business, organised by the Alliance for the Commonwealth in
Boston, Massachusetts on 2 June 1999.
I am pleased to join the Alliance for the Commonwealth today for its annual Conference on
International Business. I should also like to thank my good friends John LaWare, Chairman of
the Alliance, and Cathy Minehan, President of the Boston Federal Reserve Bank, who
encouraged me to participate in this daylong educational symposium.
There are few better examples of the benefits of trade and investment than here in Boston
where the roots of international trade go back to our nation's origins. Massachusetts, and New
England in general, are today, as in the past, actively engaged in the global trade environment
and are currently home to many of the firms that are the recipients or the sources of
crossborder direct investment.
The evidence is overwhelmingly persuasive that the massive increase in world competition - a
consequence of broadening trade flows - has fostered markedly higher standards of living for
almost all countries who have participated in cross-border trade. I include most especially the
United States. And yet, as I have indicated in recent speeches and intend to outline shortly,
there are reasons to be concerned that the benefits of increasingly open trade may not be
allowed to be as readily forthcoming in the future as they have been in the past half century.
Although many forces have been at play, the post World War II surge in trade has clearly
owed, in large part, to significant advances in technological innovation.
Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, there has been an inexorable drive to leverage
physical brawn and material resources into ever greater value added or output. New insights
into the laws of nature brought steam and later electric power. The development of a
production quality level that facilitated interchangeable parts brought assembly line
production. And the development of railroads facilitated the evolution of mass markets.
Almost all of the leverage of the physical to higher value added has reflected the substitution
of ideas - new insights - for material bulk and brute human effort.
The resulting more effective organization of material has, of course, inevitably meant that less
of it was needed per unit of output. The insights of metallurgy and architectural and
engineering design, for example, enabled the construction of buildings that use far less
physical material per unit of space than, say, a half century ago. The insights that led to central
heating, as well as synthetic fiber, facilitated reduced clothing weight, while the development
of the jet engine brought far greater annual passenger miles per unit of aircraft size.
But doubtless it has been the advent in recent decades of the synergies of the microprocessor,
lasers, and fiber optics that has fostered a distinct quickening in the displacement of physical
weight of output with concepts. The ability to miniaturize transistor electronic circuits has
displaced huge tonnages of copper and enhanced the speed of calculation that the
miniaturization of circuitry facilitated.
As high tech became an increasing part of our national product, the relative physical
dimensions of our value added fell dramatically. The per capita physical weight of our gross
domestic product is evidently only scarcely higher today than it was fifty or one hundred years
ago.
By far the largest contributor to growth of our price-adjusted GDP, or value added, has been
ideas - insights that leveraged physical reality. The consequent downsizing of output, of
course, meant that products were easier, and hence less costly, to move, and most especially
across national borders.
It is thus not surprising that the price-adjusted level of international trade, as I indicated
earlier, has expanded at a far faster pace than gains in real domestic demand. Imports of goods
and services as a percent of gross domestic products worldwide, on average, have risen from
approximately 14 percent twenty-five years ago to 24 percent today.
The growth in physical weight of such trade, as with the national product generally, has been
far less. For example, United States data on both exports and imports indicates that the
priceadjusted value of our trade per pound has risen by approximately 4 percent per year on
average over those same three decades.
But technology has augmented international trade for reasons beyond the downsizing of
material output. New telecommunications technologies made it very difficult for the autarchic
societies of the former Soviet Union to sustain their isolation in the face of the growing
relative affluence of the West. News could no longer be bottled up. Even in the West, the
stultification of protectionism became increasingly evident as new consumer products entered
the world markets en masse. The political pressures to deregulate moribund industries and
open up borders to trade soon became irresistible. The international trading system that
evolved has enhanced competition and fostered the continuous scrapping of old technologies
to make way for the new. Standards of living rise because the depreciation and other cash
flows of industries employing older, increasingly obsolescent, technologies are marshalled to
finance the newly produced capital assets that almost always embody the cutting edge
technologies. This is the process by which wealth is created incremental step by incremental
step. It presupposes a continuous churning of an economy in which the new displaces the old.
But there is also little doubt that this transition to the new high-tech economy, of which rising
trade is a part, is proving difficult for a large segment of our workforce that interfaces with our
rapidly changing capital stock day-by-day.
Moreover, while major advances in standards of living are evident among virtually all nations
that have opened their borders to increased competition, the adjustment trauma has also
distressed those who once thrived in companies that were then at the cutting edge of
technology, but which have since become increasingly less competitive in both domestic and
foreign markets. Economists will say that workers should move from the steel districts of
western Pennsylvania to a vibrant Silicon Valley. And eventually they, or more likely their
children, will. But the adjustment process is wrenching to an existing workforce made
redundant largely through no fault of their own. It may be argued that all workers should have
the foresight to recognize long-term job opportunity shifts and move in advance of
obsolescence. This regrettably is a skill not in great abundance - among business managers or
the economists who counsel them, as well as among workers.
Yet the protectionist propensity to thwart the process of the competitive flow of capital, from
failing technologies to the more productive, is unwise and surely self-defeating. History tells
us that not only is it unwise to try to hold back innovations, it is also not possible over the
longer run. Generation after generation has experienced episodes in which the technologically
obsolescent endeavored to undermine progress, often appealing to the very real short-term
costs of adjusting to a changing economic environment. From the Luddites to the Smoots and
the Hawleys, competitive forces were under attack. In the end they did not prevail and
longterm advances in standards of living resumed.
Nonetheless, the campaign to expand free trade is never won. Legislation to further lower
trade barriers, for example, is becoming increasingly more difficult to pass in our Congress. It
is a continuing battle. Further, while tariffs in industrial countries have come down sharply
over the past half century, other barriers have become more prevalent. Administrative
protection in the form of antidumping suits and countervailing duties is a case in point. While
these forms of protection have often been imposed under the label of promoting "fair trade,"
oftentimes they are just simple guises for inhibiting competition. Typically, antidumping
duties are levied when foreign average prices are below average cost of production. But that
also describes a practice that often emerges as a wholly appropriate response to a softening in
demand. It is the rare case that prices fall below marginal cost, which would be a more
relevant standard. Antidumping initiatives should be reserved, in the view of many
economists, for those cases where anticompetitive behavior is involved. Contrary to popular
notions about antidumping suits, under U.S. and WTO law, it is not required to show evidence
of predatory behavior, or intention to monopolize, or of any other intentional efforts to drive
competitors out of business.
In the end it is clear that all economic progress rests on competition. It would be a great
tragedy were we to stop the wheels of progress because of an incapacity to assist the victims
of progress.
Our efforts should be directed at job skills enhancement and retraining - a process in which
the private market is already engaged. Thwarting competition, by placing barriers to imports,
will prevent the needed transitions of the productive capital stock of the United States and
other nations that enable it to continuously concentrate on producing those goods and services
most desired by consumers. Protectionism will also slow the inevitable transition of the
workforce to more productive endeavors. To be sure, an added few years may enable some
workers to reach retirement with dignity, but it will also keep frozen in place younger workers
whose better job opportunities decline with time.
I regret that trade policy has been inextricably linked with job creation. We try to promote free
trade on the mistaken ground that it will create jobs. The reason should be that it enhances
standards of living through the effects of competition on productivity.
It is difficult to find credible evidence that trade has impacted the level of total employment in
this country over the long run. Indeed, we are currently experiencing the widest trade deficit in
history with a level of unemployment close to record lows.
Certainly, the distribution of jobs by industry is affected by international trade, but it is also
affected by domestic trade. It is the relative balance of supply and demand in a competitive
market economy that determines the mix of employment. When exports fall or imports rise,
domestic demand and relative prices have invariably adjusted in the long run to leave total
employment relatively unaffected. As economists like to say, all imports are eventually paid
for with exports.
I also regret that, despite the remarkable success over a near half century of GATT, the
General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, and its successor, the World Trade Organization, in
reducing trade barriers, our trade laws and negotiating practices are essentially adversarial.
They presume that a trade concession extracted from us by our trading partners is to their
advantage at our expense, and must be countered.
Few economists see the world that way. And I am rash enough to suggest that we economists
are correct, at least in this regard: trade is not a zero sum game.
If trade barriers are lowered by both parties, each clearly benefits. But if one lowers barriers
and the other does not, the country that lowered barriers unilaterally would still be better off
having done so. Raising barriers to achieve protectionist equality with reluctant trading
partners would be neither to our benefit, nor to theirs. The best of all possible worlds for
competition is for both parties to lower trade barriers. The worst is for both to keep them up.
For these reasons, I am concerned about the recent evident weakening of support for free trade
in this country. Should we endeavor to freeze competitive progress in place, we will almost
certainly slow economic growth overall, and impart substantial harm to those workers who
would otherwise seek more effective longer-term job opportunities. Protecting markets from
new technologies has never succeeded. Adjustments to newer technologies have been delayed,
but only at significant cost.
Even should our trading partners not retaliate in the face of increased American trade barriers,
an unlikely event, we do ourselves great harm by lessening the vigor of American
competitiveness. The United States has been in the forefront of the postwar opening up of
international markets, much to our, and the rest of the world's, benefit.
It would be a great tragedy were that process reversed. I do not believe that will be allowed to
happen. There is too much at stake for us and our trading partners.