McIntyre’s focus on global trade

Richard McIntyre, chair of the University of Rhode Island economics department, was recently named the prestigious Visiting Chair of the Americas fellow at the Institut des Ameriques in Rennes, France.

What influenced you to focus your research and career on the challenges and issues of working people?

My father was a World War II veteran and part of a generation that achieved middle-class living standards and a white-collar job without a college degree. In the 1970s I became the first person in my family to go to college at a time when it wasn’t clear those opportunities would continue due to inflation, unemployment and de-industrialization. At URI as an undergraduate I became interested in issues of international competition and manufacturing. I studied the steel industry and continued that focus as a graduate student in the 1980s at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, at a time when manufacturing was being decimated by the high value of the dollar.

What will be the focus of your research in France? Why study France in particular?

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France has a long history of a state-guided economy, and the anarchist tradition there has also been strong, so there is a tension between statism and anti-capitalism. I am interested in finding an alternative to both state socialism and corporate capitalism, which have different but severe problems.

How can national economies benefit from international collaboration?

The old story of comparative advantage still holds. If we concentrate on what we do relatively best and trade for things we want but cannot produce, everyone is potentially better off. But that story is too simple and forgets history. Ugandans did not choose to become banana pickers; that is a legacy of British imperialism. There are costs as well as benefits from trade domestically. Workers in the Providence-Fall River area have been negatively impacted by trade with China more than perhaps any other group in the country. There is no such thing as free trade, as there is always an elaborate system of rules that govern international economic relations. The question is: Who writes the rules, and in whose interest? •

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