The Washington Post has a piece today about how pay for accountants is exploding, with entry level positions paying $50,000 to $70,000. If the proponents of NAFTA and other recent trade agreements had put as much effort into standardizing rules on accounting and eliminating barriers to a free flow of accountants as they did to eliminating barriers to trade in manufactured goods, we would be paying much less for accounting services and enjoy a stronger economy. My guess is that the "free traders" are more likely to have friends and relatives who are accountants than they are to have friends or relatives who are auto workers or textile workers. Hence the trade deals are explicitly designed to put the auto workers and taxtiles workers into direct competition with low paid workers in the developing world, while the accountants remain largely protected.
--Dean Baker
