Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org where you can

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Today is July 23, 2013, and my guest is Amrita Narlekar. She's a reader in international

political economy at the Department of Politics and International Studies and the director of

the Center for Rising Powers, all at the University of Cambridge. She's written a number

of books and numerous articles on international trade and international political economy.

Amrita, welcome to Econ Talk. Thank you very much for having me.

We're going to talk about a number of issues in the area of international trade and trade

policy related to articles you've written recently that we'll link to. I want to start

with Fair Trade and the article you wrote in Foreign Affairs with Dan Kim. What is Fair

Trade and the Fair Trade movement? What are they about? What are they trying to accomplish?

Fair Trade and we'll use capital letters here when we talk about Fair Trade. A product

is granted a Fair Trade label once its producers have met a list of social, economic and environmental

requirements. The stated purpose of the Fair Trade movement is to give economic security

to producers in developing countries. Usually, these are producers of unprocessed commodities,

just fruits, live animals, minerals. By requiring companies and plums, you must pay a premium

on the marketplace. Here in the United States, I think most consumers

encounter it at Starbucks, the coffee chain, where they tell their consumers that they're

...