This is a really good Kevin O’Rourke piece, with a summary of the history of globalization, along with the literature on the anti-globalization backlashes of the nineteenth century (focused largely on trade and migration) and of the Great...
cambridge.org/core/journals/…
cambridge.org/core/journals/…
...Depression (with more focus on capital flows and the gold standard).
One thing I would point out is the widespread agreement that the backlash against globalization comes, in the author’s words, “with dangerous geopolitical consequences.” This was also the point effectively...
One thing I would point out is the widespread agreement that the backlash against globalization comes, in the author’s words, “with dangerous geopolitical consequences.” This was also the point effectively...
...made yesterday by the new head of the IMF, Kristalina Georgieva, who argued that “trade is great for peace: when countries trade, they don’t fight that much.”
Whether or not this is in fact true (it’s hard to forget Norman Angell’s “The Great Illusion”), I’m worried that we...
Whether or not this is in fact true (it’s hard to forget Norman Angell’s “The Great Illusion”), I’m worried that we...
...may be accepting this claim a little too simplistically. Is it the globalization backlash itself that leads to “dangerous geopolitical consequences”, or is it the deep imbalances that can emerge during the globalization period that create the institutional distortions...
...(including balance sheet distortions) that lead ultimately both to the backlash and to the subsequent “dangerous geopolitical consequences”? Does trade conflict lead to geopolitical tensions, or are both the consequences of some other distortion?
The answer matters a lot...
The answer matters a lot...
...If it is the former, then we clearly should do everything we can to end the current trade disputes between the US and China (and Germany) and return to the pre-2008 world. If it is the latter, then just as clearly we must quickly resolve the deep imbalances that have led...
...to the current trade conflict. If we believe for example that one of the consequences of “globalization” has been a rise in income inequality that both results from and reinforces the global trading regime (as Matt Klein and I argue in our upcoming book), then the problem...
...is not trade conflict in itself but rather the conditions created during the pre-trade-conflict world. Rather than try to roll back trade conflict, we should be clear about its goals and accelerate its resolution.
