Abstract
In the last half century, world trade has grown twice as fast as output and helped to lift the majority of the world's people from poverty -- a feat unimaginable a generation ago. Are we drawing "a line down the middle of the Pacific," or avoiding one, as Secretary of State James Baker pleaded we should when the United States joined APEC in 1989? A new study by colleagues and me at the East-West Center suggests a subtle, positive scenario. Economist Peter A. Petri is a nonresident senior fellow with the East-West Center and a professor of international finance at Brandeis University.