While I was abroad in Australia, I was actually in a course called “International Trade and Competition.” I thought it was very interesting to learn about international trade from an outside perspective. It was kind of funny because most of the class was centered around the United States and my teacher often used the U.S. and China as examples.
With that being said, I found most of Chapter 2 to be closely related to some of the main concepts I had learned in my class abroad. For example, we discussed the “waves of globalization” post-World War II as mentioned in our text. After WWII, the world began to realize that both producers and consumers could benefit from international trade; consumers can purchase a large variety of higher quality goods at lower prices, while producers can specialize in areas that they have a relative advantage allowing for efficiency in production and resource allocation. However, in my class abroad we did not learn about the International Monetary Fund’s involvement in overcoming market barriers after WWII, which I found to be helpful in understanding the increase in global growth over the past few decades.