Remarks by Chairman Alan Greenspan
Globalization
At the Institute for International Economics' Inauguration of the Peter G. Peterson Building, Washington, D.C. October 24, 2001
I am pleased to be with you tonight as the Institute for International Economics dedicates this extraordinary new building. I am also pleased to note that you are celebrating your twentieth year in the business of thinking critically about vital international economic issues. It hardly seems that long.
Before the tragic events of September 11, discussions of the international economy had increasingly come to be centered on issues related to the growing integration of our economies. The strife we had witnessed over economic globalization was the twenty-first century's version of debates over societal organization that go back at least to the dawn of the industrial revolution, and many of the intellectual roots of those debates go back far longer.
There has been a simmering down of the more vociferous protests against globalization since September 11. But the debate surrounding the increasing cross-border integration of markets inevitably will be rejoined. The issue elicits such strong reaction because it centers on the important question of how economies are organized and, specifically, how individuals deal with one another.
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