Free trade makes rich countries richer a

Free trade makes rich countries richer and poor countries poorer

Nowadays, free trade is an important trend of the global trade. Free trade means
that there should be no controls on trade or capital investment. Barriers on trade
such as tariff, quotas... are removed. Free trade brings many advantages and
disadvantages to the countries. In my opinion, free trade may increse the gap
between rich and poor countries.
Firstly, the rich countries gain more from free trade. When they execute the free
trade agreement (FTA) with other countries, they can purchase the goods and
materials that have lower cost and higher quality than before. According to the
absolute advantage theory, a nation has the ability to produce a good more
efficiently than the rest of the world. The developed countries that not only have the
high technology, experiences on manufacture and management, but also import the
good primary commodities with the low price from the LDCs. They can produce the
goods more easily, so they can sell the finished products with the lower price. The
developed countries gain the benefit most from free trade. They are richer and
richer.
For the poor countries, they are facing some challenges in free trade. Their low
technology and unimproved infrastructure unable them to produce goods in the
same volume and quality as the developed economies who have great competencies.
Their export structure mainly depend on primary commodities which have low price.
On the other hand, they must import some finished products and semi-finished
products from the developed countries. According to the term of trade theory, the
TOT of the LDCs is usually less than 1, so they loss from trade.
In conlusion, the free trade shall bring many not only advantages but also
disadvantages to countries. The gap in income between the developed countries and
less developed countries are continued to widen.