"Is Wal-Mart Good for America?" offers two starkly contrasting images: one of empty storefronts in Circleville, Ohio, where the local TV manufacturing plant has closed down; the other a sea of high-rises in the southern China boomtown of Shenzhen. The connection between American job losses and soaring Chinese exports? Wal-Mart. For Wal-Mart, China has become the cheapest, most reliable production platform in the world, the source of as much as $25 billion in annual imports, which helps the company deliver low prices to 100 million customers a week.

But while some economists credit Wal-Mart's single-minded focus on low costs with helping to contain U.S. inflation, others charge that the company is the main force driving the massive shift overseas of the production of American consumer goods, resulting in hundreds of thousands of lost jobs and a lower standard of living here at home.