Introduction by prof. Moran Welcome to the Georgetown campus.

The name of our course is Globalization's Winners and Losers: Challenges for Developed and Developing Countries. We have more than 20,000 participants in this course from some 150 countries. Now by globalization, this course refers to the spread of trade, technology, and investment. I say that because it is a rather narrow economic definition of globalization. Here on the Georgetown campus, you could take courses on Hollywood versus Bollywood, on the clash of civilizations, and these would be considered forms of globalization, but we are going to focus on the winners and losers from the economic interactions across borders. We begin with some of the most controversial areas in the developing world, namely the resource curse and foreign investment in oil and gas, diamonds, gold, copper. We look at corruption, transparency. We try and figure out how to address some of these issues. We move to sweatshops, that is to say, low wage, low skilled producers of garments and footwear. And we let you, all 20,000 of you, grapple with what constitutes exploitation. And indeed you let us know and we enter into debates on how to define exploitation in sweatshops. We come to the surprising discovery though that most foreign direct investment in manufacturing and assembly is not in lower skill activities but rather in industrial, middle-skilled activities. And this is a segue into focusing on the developed world, because we ask, does this industrialization of the developing world come at the expense of workers and firms in the developed world? What are the causes of the US trade deficit? Is China becoming an economic superpower? What about outsourcing to India? What is causing wage stagnation and wage disparities in the United States? To what extent is globalization to blame? If you had taken this course 15 years ago-- 15 years is just about right, because it was in 1999 that the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle broke into a riot against globalization. If you had taken the course prior to that, you probably would have just celebrated the benefits. Now we spend almost as much time looking at the losers, at those marginalized or not prepared and equipped to enjoy the benefits of globalization. Our objective is to enlarge the numbers of those who benefit from globalization and figure out ways to cushion those who are not well prepared or who may be marginalized by globalization. And this will lead us to policy recommendations, indeed some expensive policy recommendations. But unlike everybody else here in Washington, we in our course are going to figure out how to pay for this. So I welcome you to the Georgetown campus. We are going to be participating together for seven intense weeks. Let's get to work.