Globalization
The growing integration of product, labor, and capital markets across borders—often associated with trade openness, supply chains, and cultural exchange.
Globalization describes cross-border flows of goods, services, finance, ideas, and people. For states, it shows up as export mix, port activity, immigrant workforce participation, and exposure to shocks abroad.
Competing narratives frame it as either a driver of efficiency and consumer choice or a source of inequality and vulnerability for particular workers and places.
Maps and aggregates
State-level trade metrics make tangible which regions are tightly coupled to world markets. Aggregates will not capture every community story, but they help ground debates about openness, adjustment assistance, and industrial policy.
The economists-hour content plan explicitly links the state_trade_metrics dataset to globalization together with trade surplus, trade deficit, exchange rates, capital flows, and economic growth—the bundle of ideas this dashboard is built to support.