HONG KONG — Pascal Lamy, director general of the World Trade Organization, recently made an interesting and thoughtful plea for a new approach to trade, with the idea that "Made in the world" could often be a more accurate description than one that put a purely national label on a product.
He cited an iPod "imported from China" as a good example of how the country of final assembly belies the international locations where the product was developed and its components were manufactured.
However, Lamy's suggestion of recalculating the value of exports and imports would not get to grips with some of the most pressing and interlinked issues of modern global economic life: the persistence of high unemployment levels in the old industrialized countries, the continuing massive government deficits and the badly advised drift in much of the Western world to service economies dominated by mega-financial institutions.