NEW YORK, Oct. 9 (Xinhua) -- "Today you can't go back to where you were 40 years ago, de-globalization will be extraordinary costly," Nobel Prize winner and renowned economist Joseph Stiglitz said here on Sunday.
Speaking at the 25th Annual Convention of Chinese Association for Science and Technology, USA (CAST-USA), Stiglitz said we have created global supply chains worldwide, and when we interrupt them, costs go up.
Take the auto industry for example. In the United States, auto industry depends heavily on parts imported from Mexico, which ensure the U.S. car makers to get these parts produced at a much lower cost than they could be produced in the United States.
The prices of American cars would be too higher to sell abroad and compete with imports from abroad if they would totally be made in the U.S. Then American automobile industry will go down, and the auto workers would be among the people who suffer the loss.
In 2016, the U.S. imported 294 billion U.S. dollars of products from Mexico, with cars and car parts on the top category, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
"We can go through industry by industry," said Stiglitz, suggesting the auto industry would not be the only industry going to lose on de-globalization.
"You don't win by closing yourself off with protectionism and anti-migration policies in a modern, competitive innovation economy," he added.
He also noted that science knowledge is a global "public goods," saying if we advance science everybody in the world can potentially benefit through globalization.
The 2001 Nobel prize recipient in Economics pointed out that China's role of leadership has been particularly important in globalization.
The rule of law is important for every country. When we talk about how our economy couldn't function without a rule of law, it is all the same with the global economy, representing by the WTO as part of that rule of law, he added.
Founded in 1992 in New York City, CAST-USA is a non-profit American Chinese organization dedicated to promoting understanding between Americans and ethnic Chinese in the United States.
