I am probably not the person this Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) is aimed at. Still, it has merit.

This online course (running again in October 2017) is presented by Richard Baldwin and designed around his justifiably praised 2016 book, The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalisation. It consists of four weeks of short instructional videos, links to useful magazine articles, and documentaries from YouTube. Doing the course alone without any of the suggested additional reading takes about three hours per week. It is topical, drawing on recent articles and videos, and pitched in such a way that non-specialists are introduced to some major issues in international trade. Importantly, there are no technical glitches. I accessed the course easily and equally well on computers and tablets from various locations. Importantly, the instructional videos are purpose-built and not simply recordings of classroom lectures, unlike some MOOCs.

The course is designed around four topics. Week one defines globalisation. Week two examines the history of globalisation, focusing on the great divergence and great convergence in the economic fortunes of the East and the West. Week three focuses on models of international trade with particular reference to comparative advantage and the three cascading constraint explanation of the changing nature of globalization. Week four focuses on new technology and how it could influence trade patterns in the future.

Making a complex subject accessible to a general audience is to be applauded but it carries a particular risk. Accessibility often requires simplification. Simplification removes detail. The trick is to ensure the detail removed is not vital. For this course, I was disappointed that two important details are covered only in passing.

First, the implications for thinking about international trade presented by the combination of the new economic geography approach and the emergence of endogenous growth theory are given less emphasis than appropriate. New economic geography extends Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage to help explain how rapid technological development has changed the nature of international trade from countries selling completed products to each other to the global value change approach where countries co-operate by trading components until a completed product is assembled. Endogenous growth theory helps explain how the positive agglomeration effects of grouping production together can be much greater than the negative effects of congestion. Baldwin highlights these issues in part three of his book. Indeed, he is one of the champions of new economic geography.

Second, the challenges of redistributing income from the winners of globalisation to the losers are not covered in sufficient detail. It is not enough to imply that the gains from trade are unambiguously positive and more European-style redistribution and social policies would reduce the backlash against globalisation seen in several countries. Once again, these issues are covered in some detail in Baldwin’s book.

Backing up the course with the extra reading suggested in the course solves these problems. But I fear those not inclined to read further will miss key aspects and nuances of the debate and will assume economists favour globalisation without question.