The pros are straightforward: as a seller you have access to a huge market, basically you can sell pretty much anywhere in the world. As a buyer you a a huge choice; you can buy from wherever gives you the best price and the right quality.

The cons are a bit more complicated and the key is remembering that a market is not a place to buy and sell so much as a set of rules that govern the buying and selling. By ‘rules’ I mean not just the laws but the cultures, the expectations and norms that people in a market (in this case a country) take for granted.

If a buyer, lets call him Andy, goes to a market in the UK. A seller, Zac, is selling carrots at £2 a kilo. Andy hands over £1 and can be pretty sure of getting 0.5 of a kilo of carrots, that the carrots will be of a decent quality and will actually be carrots and not parsnips painted orange. There is a set of rules operating here that are designed to protect Andy and most countries have a similar, but different, set of rules that Andy may not be fully aware of.

International trade has been going on for millennia and, in international trade, merchants like Zac take ‘stuff’ to another market and they have to comply with the rules of that market so that people like Andy are protected. In globalised trade, the world is, in effect, one great big market and Andy can buy his carrots form a Zac who can be anywhere in the world but, and it is a big but, Andy is buying under Zac’s market rules. And that is where the problems start.

Globalised trade doesn’t just shift goods and services around the world. It also shifts rules and expectations. If Andy can buy carrots cheaper from a Zac in China, he is not buying them from the Zac in his local high street and he doesn’t expect to pay the prices his local Zac is charging. Access to Chinese carrots has changed Andy’s expectations and his local Zac is suffering as a result. The market rules have changed, even though there hasn’t been a change in the law.

But access to the global market is so easy that Andy may be totally unaware of its effects on him, Zac, and everyone else in his home market, until Zac and his colleagues take to marching down the street in protest.