In the near term, some reallocation of resources will occur within each country, generating gains for some producers and costs for others.
New industries emerge, some industries expand, some contract, and some die.
In economic terms, all countries liberalizing trade benefit in the long-run. One country's overall gain does not come at the expense of another trade-liberalizing country. All 12 living U.S. Nobel Laureates in economics, some representing quite different perspectives on economics, signed the letter. Among those signing were Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, Paul Samuelson and James Tobin. Unlike other issues in economics, where viewpoints can be quite different, the benefits of free trade are accepted by a large majority of academic economists.