Critics of globalization claim that economic liberalization leads to a lowering of regulatory standards. As capital and corporations move more freely across national boundaries, a race to the bottom results as governments are forced to weaken labor and environmental standards to retain current contracts or attract new business. The essays in this volume argue that, on the contrary, under certain circumstances global economic integration can actually lead to the strengthening of consumer and environmental standards. This volume extends the argument of David Vogel's book Trading Up,...

Hopes for a new peaceful international order after the end of the Cold War have been dashed by sobering realities: Great powers are once again competing for honor and influence. The world remains unipolar, but international competition among the United States, Russia, China, Europe, Japan, India, and Iran raise new threats of regional conflict, and a new contest between western liberalism and the great eastern autocracies of Russia and China has reinjected ideology into geopolitics.
For the past few years, the liberal world has been internally divided and distracted by issues both...