Ticket to Trade: Belgian Labor and Globalization Before 1914

Abstract

Standard trade theory, as invoked by political scientists and economists, would anticipate that workers in Belgium, a small Old World country, rich in labor relative to land, were in a good position to benefit from the wave of globalization before 1914. However, wage increases remained modest and labor moved slowly towards adopting a free-trade position. Beginning in 1885, the Belgian labor party backed free trade, but its support was conditional on more and better social legislation. Belgian workers' wellbeing improved in the wave of globalization, but the vehicle was labor and social legislation and not rising wages.