Organizer: Cornell University

Lecture Series: Gatty Lecture Series

Description:

Are the poor ambivalent about globalization? Do they fail to understand the new economic opportunities and constraints associated with greater market integration? Despite the effects of trade liberalization on job opportunities and losses, as well as its impacts on consumer products and prices in the domestic market, most existing scholarship on globalization maintains that only the highly educated have any sense of its distributional impacts. Study after study finds that only the college- educated are economically literate; and this is a fundamental predictor of their favorability towards open markets. Yet, other research in economics and psychology shows that economic need is a key driver of economic learning, suggesting – but not testing – that the uneducated poor may have incentives to be knowledgeable about the impacts of globalization. We challenge the conventional view and propose that disadvantaged populations are the most motivated to learn about the distributional effects of globalization shocks in their locality. Faced with economic uncertainty, enduring economic hardship and a dearth of information on how to overcome this adversity trigger their efforts to seek information. More specifically, as developing countries embrace international markets, we anticipate that economically insecure groups – and migrants in particular- are the most incentivized to educate themselves on factors that might improve their situation in the changing economy. We focus on migrants because they come from vulnerable households and have the most limited access to information on the vast array of economic opportunities in their destination. In contrast to permanent residents in their host city, migrant workers tend to be employed in lower skill jobs, subject to insufficient and unstable income, harsh working conditions, and poor and unsanitary living situations (e.g., Das 2020, Qui et al 2011). We test our theory with a nation wide randomized experiment in Vietnam, finding that migrants are twice as likely as other groups to educated themselves about the forthcoming EU-Vietnam trade agreement.

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