US, Europe and the developing world: transatlantic challenges for world integration

For more than a decade Europe has been lagging behind the US in growth of aggregate GDP, per capita GDP, productivity, employment, as well as in demographic selection of new firms and in the design of market-friendly regulations. While an increasing trade agglomeration around large "regional" areas (NAFTA, Asia-Pacific, Europe) has taken place in the last decades, the US has become the primary external market outlet for many partners, including Western Europe. Moreover, trends in stocks and flows of foreign direct investment, while reflecting the increasing share of developing Asia and (to a lesser extent) of Central-Eastern Europe as countries of destination, do reveal a persistent solid Transatlantic interdependence through multinational production. An accelerating world integration of low-wages/highly productive emerging economies raises in US and Europe mounting fears of "excessive competition", massive net job destruction, downward spiral in domestic wages. While most empirical evidence points to positive "trade multiplier effects" from integration of newly industrializing economies in world economic development, national governments and international institutions are under pressure to provide effective "trade adjustment" policy measures, mainly aimed at restructuring declining activities, re-training manpower, improving infrastructures for labour mobility, favouring more technology generation and diffusion. Europe is seriously lagging under this respect. After the failure of Cancùn, both US and Europe share a big responsibility in providing new impetus to the ailing Doha Development Round. Under the pressure of the newly formed G-20, but also of the mounting tensions on the world political scenario (Islamic terrorism, Palestine, Middle East), both sides of the Atlantic seem aware of the great stakes and in search of new negotiating moves.