The evolution of the world economy in the last years has been characterized by a growing integration of national economies. This phenomenon, denominated globalization, has been associated with a decisive importance of the growth of international trade, investments and financial capital flows.

Among the multiple facts that have been characteristic of this evolution, particularly two stand out: the change of national trade policies, that involves a movement towards a greater openness and the deregulation in the least developed countries, which is invariably related with the importance of international trade as propelling force of economic development.

Two are the vectors that have been motorizing the growth of trade flows of goods and services and the capital movements.

The first is technology, especially in relation with the development of communications (communication technology) and computer science, in terms of technological progress and reduction of costs. Both forces have carried to an extreme the combination between specialization and international division of labor, to the point that nowadays a firm that operates to an international scale can locate any part of its activities in remote points of the planet and control them, at an extremely reduced cost, from a main office, without the need of physical employment of resources in the location point. In the same vein, the frontier among tradable and non tradable goods has moved and is moving permanently, increasing the share of the first type of goods over the second, an effect that reinforces even more the above mentioned trend. On the other hand, the greatest range of options now available for location of activities has increased competition among nations for the attraction of investments.

The second vector has been tariff liberalization on trade, starting from the reductions negotiated within the GATT-WTO and national unilateral decisions of trade openness that have also been accompanied, in most cases, by a greater openness to capital inflows and outflows. This liberalization, however, was also considerably reinforced by the important and trendy fall of costs of transport.

The growth of international capital flows - together with the greater openness of financial systems already pointed out - has also been a promoting factor of globalization, as well as their orientation, now more directed toward worldwide activities, in contrast with the previous period, when the attention focused on internal markets, besides increased financial relationships between firms, "tied" to productive complementation. This improved in great measure the pace of international trade growth and, at the same time, it diminished the degree of autonomy of national monetary and exchange policies, thus increasing the sensitivity of these economies to financial movements, just as it has been witnessed in the speed and magnitude of dissemination of crises in recent times.

The deeper integration of national economies and the consequently greater complexity in commercial relationships have multiplied the sources of trade conflicts, now not because of the existence of tariffs or other trade barriers, but due to the presence of trade policies or trade-related issues that affect the relative competitiveness of the activities located within national frontiers, by reason of the incidence of different regulatory frameworks. Therefore, international trade negotiation agendas incorporate the discussion of trade policies and trade-related issues, over the commercial treatment agreed for marketed products.

The international insertion of the least developed countries has been achieved through two not mutually excluding ways: adoption of unilateral measures of trade openness or regional trade agreements. For the developing economies, individually considered, the improvement of market access conditions by developed countries implies a series of concessions concerning their policies and trade disciplines that reduce their autonomy in handling them. That's why the building up of regional blocks - like the case of Mercosur - can be seen as an alternative to enlarge the market within closed frontiers and given a greater homogeneity of the involved national economies. In that context, the convergence of trade policies toward the negotiated standards or the ones to be negotiated multilaterally, becomes simpler and less expensive. Also, the negotiation of regional agreements facilitates, within certain margins, the discriminatory rising of certain restrictions that still apply in the multilateral environment, under the WTO rules.

Finally, the events in the international arena go so fast that the main protagonists are not capable of analyzing and preventing them. The velocity of communications has contributed to enrich the knowledge and to disseminate the information on what happens in each corner of the world but, at the same time, it has surpassed the ability to process it, deriving in a complex and sophisticated set of variables that considerably delimit the available time for reflecting about the meaning of the changes verified day by day, outlining problems of all nature, from the fundamental ethics of the human life until the evolution of the economic and trade relations between people and nations.