Fair trade advocates for inclusive growth through the promotion and establishment of greater equity for all as well as higher environmental standards in global value chains.Inclusive globalization promotes social justice, market fairness, and living standard amelioration. This addresses as well the social behavior of MNEs through their corporate social responsibility efforts by engaging in responsible international business activities. The purpose of inclusive globalization lies not only in opening markets, but in expanding opportunity and promoting cooperation. Bashar Malkawi

The principle of comparative advantage is the stated principle for negotiating, drafting, implementing, and enforcing rules to liberalize trade on a multilateral, regional, or bilateral basis. The assumption is that trade is always beneficial, even if one country had an absolute advantage. The assumption is not always true and does not hold water in today's world. Capital is looking for cheap wages and places with low environmental standards. Bashar Malkawi

The US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement (USMCA) FTA includes explicitly provisions concerning digital trade. The USMCA ensures that physical software and downloaded software are both treated the same. The entire purpose of the FTA is to lower barriers to trade in all sectors, including digital trade; therefore, the U.S., Mexico, and Canada were in the position with digital trade to never even establish a tariff that would later need to be lowered and eliminated.The FTA creates duty-free cyberspace. 
 

A closer examination of the USMCA on digital trade revealed that the parties invent some specific rules needed for digital trade. For most of the digital trade provisions in the USMCA, the approach of the parties was based on the simple premise that digital trade is trade, that it is only the form by which the commercial transaction is performed which may be new, and not its substance; thus the parties relied on existing treaties or domestic laws. Thus, the USMCA does not require many legal changes to domestic laws.

The digital trade provisions in the USMCA showed the need to push the debate over digital trade forward. Future trade agreements should expand existing trade rules or draw up new rules. There is a host of digital trade issues that need to be addressed in future trade agreements. Among them are including new technologies such as block chain, classification of the content of certain electronic transmissions, the issue of "likeness" of e-goods; development-related issues, including access to infrastructure and technology; fiscal and revenue implications of digital trade. Bashar H. Malkawi