"When you choose to fight for free trade, you sign on for life. Like 'Jaws' and James Bond films, protectionism rises again and again, taking ever-new forms," Professor Jagdish Bhagwati has said. Bhagwati, one of the world's foremost experts on the issue of free trade, is widely considered to be a future candidate for the Nobel Prize in Economics. Prolific in his writings and vocal in his opposition to protectionism, he has become a key figure in the debate on globalization as one of its strongest proponents. Decades of research have lead Bhagwati to assert that free trade is optimal when its distortions are corrected by policy. In recent years he has combated its opponents by making a distinction between free trade in manufactured goods which benefits welfare, and free trade in capital which has a different set of complications. An outspoken critic of the unfair trade practices of the U.S. government, Bhagwati has championed free trade less always as an instrument of benefit to the developing nations of the world. The central ideas of his arguments, which he laid out in his 2004 book, In Defense of Globalization (Oxford), were described by The Economist as having a "refreshingly straightforward approach" that took "anti-globalist arguments seriously." Prominent in the fields of both theory and policy-making, he has not only heavily influenced the field of trade economy but also served as an advisor to the World Trade Organization and the United Nations.

Early in his career, Bhagwati began to explore the connections between trade, distortions, and welfare. As a graduate student at Cambridge, he wrote a seminal paper on how sudden the sudden economic growth of a country can negatively affect its trade and thereby its welfare. His work with the Statistical Bureau in his home country of India lead him to recommend that economic growth was the only way to reducing poverty. His involvement as an advisor in Indian economic policy of the time lead him to see the pitfalls of its closed markets and in the early 1980s he wrote "Protectionism" which explored the subject through its determinants of ideas, interests and institutions. According to Bhagwati's former student Paul Krugman, the economist and New York Times columnist, Bhagwati played a "large if subtle role in keeping protectionism from becoming respectable."

Jagdish Bhagwati, In Defense of Globalization. Oxford University Press, 2004.