A host of activists, policy-makers, and scholars have been asserting that today’s international economic structure and its associated outcomes are fundamentally unfair or unjust to many people, especially the poor or least advantaged, and also to many countries, particularly those in the developing world. By questioning the morality and legitimacy of the contemporary multilateral system that governs world trade and finance, these critics have generated a widespread normative debate. But what, precisely, do these critics mean when they claim that the global economy is unjust or unfair? In this essay I present three models, or frameworks, that seek to capture some of the central normative concerns that these critics have expressed about economic globalization (at least in its present form) and the empirical information that is relevant to assessing them.
