SO WE LIVE in a globalized world, which impacts on jobs, wages, consumers, and producers. All of which already have received too much attention to require further comment by me.

But what we have not fully considered is the extent to which globalized markets produce pressures for globalization of government policies. And some policymakers and officials want to build dikes to prevent the regulatory policies of other countries from leaking into theirs. In Europe, the big worry is that what the European Union considers excessively burdensome financial regulation will seep into Europe's financial markets. So Ed Balls, the new Economic secretary to the British Treasury, and the chancellor of the exchequer's principal ally, is assuring the City that in the event of a takeover of the London Stock Exchange by NASDAQ, now deemed likely, the government will save the City from the dreaded heavy hand of American regulation, most especially the hated Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

Stock exchanges in America are facing such competitive pressure from London's less-heavily regulated exchanges that they are scrambling to lighten the regulatory load. Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson and New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, both intimately familiar with the working of financial markets, see the globalization process as a threat to the ability of New York to compete with London in the competition for share listings. So they are each initiating studies of ways to make Wall Street less regulated, and therefore more competitive. Which in practice, means getting Congress to modify Sarbanes-Oxley by exempting smaller firms from

In addition, both the Treasury secretary and the mayor are putting pressure on the Securities and Exchange Commission to take a more relaxed view of the procedures companies must adopt to comply with SOX, as it is known (or "Darn Sox", as the Economist dubs it).

This is only one, albeit the most prominent, of the consequences of the globalization of policy. Tax is another. More and more companies operating in high-tax venues are casting envious eyes on lower-tax Ireland and a variety of island tax havens. Britain's chancellor Gordon Brown has always resisted calls of high-tax E.U. countries for "tax harmonization," fearing that meant imposing on the United Kingdom the stultifying tax regime of the European Union. Now the shoe is on the other foot, and the market is attempting to impose on him the low-tax regime of countries that British companies are beginning to consider as havens from the Inland Revenue's apparently insatiable desire for funds, and the intrusiveness of its 70,000 tax collectors. We are witnessing on an international scale the sort of tax competition that has always existed among our states in their scramble to attract business. (Although that competition has most often been on a one-shot basis when a business was mulling over a decision to locate a new plant.)

Meanwhile, the U.S. business community is calling for all manner of harmonizations. The, shall we say, looser policies of many countries towards the protection of intellectual property allows foreign competitors to steal American technology, audiovisual content, and designs. So firms in industries from pharmaceuticals to film-making want to harmonize rules on the use of IP--which is a bridge too far for China, where it is possible to buy the DVD of a film for $1 on the day of its U.S. theatrical release. Intellectual property disputes are also a source of some trade tension between U.S. pharmaceutical companies and Australia, a country somewhat less deferential to the patent claims of America's drugs companies.