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Liberalization is a process that generates economic and social changes, both at a quantitative and a qualitative level, leading to cumulative and durable transformations. The process of liberalization has had different manifestations according to the characteristics and requests of each period apart. The general tendency, since the mercantilist period, is that of increasing the rate of liberalization, most of the world states seeing in this process the solution for economic and social prosperity, and hence for development. The current stage of development characterized by knowledge grants liberalization the status of essential factor of socio-economic equilibrium; that is why it is followed by both the macro-economic policies of each country apart and the regional and global ones. The economic growth and development are conditioned by the application of coherent measures of economic policy, whose action should aim at a wide range of fields, sectors and processes, among which one can also find that of economic liberalization, a premise and at the same time a result of the dynamics of knowledge. Given the importance of liberalization, we wish to present, in our approach, from an epistemological point of view, the main determinants of this process, especially those of quantitative nature, with no pretension of seizing them in all their complexity and scope. Economic liberalization, a main factor of growth and development in the knowledge society, is in its turn influenced by a series of quantitative and qualitative determinants, with a direct and indirect action, whose effects can be felt in the whole economic and social apparatus; this motivates us to seize and analyse them in our theoretical dissertation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We wish to outline, in our approach, the main features of the economic protectionism in this new stage of development characterized by knowledge. Debates over protectionism are vast and complex. Given that, since the beginning of the 18th century, with the first physiocratic ideas, liberalization has benefited from an intense lobby, protectionism has lost ground from the theoretical, but not from the practical point of view. At the beginning of the 21" century, when the world and the environment have suffered deep modifications, under the impact of globalization and knowledge, protectionism is, on the one hand, more and more censured, and on the other hand it still has a lot of supporters, especially from among the developing countries. The emerging countries ended by regarding protectionism as the solution for them to leave the shadow where they were lying following the multilateral liberalization, whose measures seemed to support the developed countries, which, in their turn, continue to practice protectionism, both in a direct and an indirect form. Over this paper, on the basis of an epistemological analysis, we will present economic protectionism, its better and worse consequences, framing it in what seems to become the knowledge society. Does this new stage of economic and social evolution accept the idea of protectionism at the national level, or are the world states willing to open themselves, from an economic and social point of view, regardless of the group of development they are part of, in order to benefit from the multiple advantages that knowledge offers, assuming all risks pertaining to liberalization? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]