Free trade denotes a state of international commercial relations premised on governments' restraint from using policy instruments meant to favor indigenous industries against foreign competitors. According to the conventional trade theory advocated by classical and neo-classical thinkers, free trade makes little economic sense failing nations' tendency to specialize based on comparative advantage, a concept with high persuasive influence despite the elapsing of time. Even though the comparative advantage rule has seldom been questioned per se, the free trade concept has been fiercely disputed and not infrequently, bashed. Nations' involvement in international trade often follows patterns that do not fit theoretical models but attempt to respond to circumstantial interests, most often the need to protect poorly competitive industries. In common parlance, free trade has had both proponents and enemies.

The relation between international trade and environmental and social issues has deep historical roots, having been manifest ever since the first industrial revolution. Ironically, the expansion of industrial activities marked, besides the exit from economic backwardness, the commencement of an inexorable war of men against nature. Concomitantly industrialization laid the groundwork for an explosive increase in international trade, which made the latter responsible for increasing environment degradation and social rights infringement. The removal of trade barriers in the first decades after the Second World War as well as the subsequent regulation induced by globalization rendered the bad effects of man’s activity upon nature even more conspicuous. Yet somewhat paradoxically, for all the harm inflicted upon the environment so far, international trade now seems to be an efficient vehicle by which dirty production still prevailing in many countries of the world could be curtailed. The paper is intended to explore, from historical perspective, how environmental issues have come to be entangled with international trade and how serious the problem is.

The formidable surge in the volume of international trade after 1960 stimulated surveys designed to ascertain to what degree the commercial flows among nations reflected the structure of their economies, in other words, how tight was the correlation between international exchanges and the specific attributes of participating nations. In fact, scholars were keen to test the relevance of the conventional Heckscher-Ohlin theory, that is, to what extent did nations’ exports reflect their endowment with factors of production, more specifically, whether their exports used their abundant factors intensively. I try to show that, although most of the tests reached their purpose in that they confirmed the conventional theory’s predictions, in certain cases such as Japan, whose economy is arguably idiosyncratic, factor specificity is more relevant than factor intensity in explaining, not only the country’s international specialization but also the premises of its uncanny 20th century ascendance to the top of the world economy.

In keeping with an already entrenched paradigm, international trade in tasks exerts upward pressure upon skilled workers' wages in both home and host countries. Yet certain empirical evidence from intra-European trade shows that sometimes things occur in reverse, that is high skilled workers' wages in home countries may decline as a result of offshoring, an outcome that looks like an inverse "maquiladora effect". I try to show that such deviations do not fly in the face of mainstream theory but rather, they reflect the different conditions under which offshoring is performed today as compared to the ones prevailing two decades ago.

The term "globalization" designates the rapidly advancing international economic integration through substantial growth in trade of goods and services as well as surging cross-border factor mobility from the early 1990s onwards.This acceleration in the liberalization of world trade and capital movements is largely attributable to technological progress which significantly curtailed the expenses for transport as well as communication. In conjunction with the progressing opening of major newly industrializing economies endowed with abundant and cheap labor forces, it has reinforced a geographical fragmentation of production processes according to cost considerations. This phenomenon termed as "vertical specialization", "outsourcing" or also "slicing the value chain" in turn has translated into a hike in FDI and international trade of intermediate products. The main objective of this paper is to identify adequate trade models for assessing the corresponding effects of those developments. In this context, textbook trade theories spanning from comparative advantage à la Ricardo to the new-new trade theory are examined. Subsequently, we expand on globalization-induced new forms of trade (intra-firm trade, trade within the value chain) and finally conclude with our findings to properly account for those trends.

In this paper I discuss two long disputed notions: that capitalism without crises is a fallacy respectively that capitalism bashing, however severe, will not endanger the system itself. Yet proving both is not an easy task since the capitalism issue has always been a cupellation of theory, ideology and political precepts, which are controversial and hard to disentangle. That capitalism detractors are numberless is a truism. Yet criticism against capitalism, however fierce, has always been clearly delineated. Not any more: globalization has rendered the picture dangerously fuzzy. It is now hard to ascertain whether someone who will harangue about the ostensible evils of globalization is also a declared anti-capitalist. The blend of capitalism and globalization seems to be pure dynamite.

The indisputable success of the European integration project also prompted other regions of the world to follow suit. On the other side of coin, these regional blocs cultivated free trade within but remained protectionist vis-àvis the outside, thereby impeding the progress of the multilateral trade system. But also the soaring number of WTO member states accompanied by their incompatible interests, its ambitious agenda spanning over 20 diverse issues and, in particular, the single undertaking approach emerged as the Doha’s Round “stumbling blocks”. The utter dismay over the Doha’s Round deadlock has provoked countries to opt for alternative for a outside the WTO in their endeavor to expedite far-reaching trade liberalization. Besides the vast economic growth in Asia and the rise of international production networks, this urge for deeper integration represents one of the central root causes for the most recent wave of PTAs which has been gathering force over the course of the 21st century and increasingly puts the WTO’s raison d’être under critical scrutiny.

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