The Past Decade and the Future of the Global Economy

The global financial crisis of 2008 was widely seen as heralding the death of globalization. But, to paraphrase a remark widely attributed to the American novelist Mark Twain, “reports of its demise were greatly exaggerated.” Now, however, over a decade after the crisis, globalization hangs in the balance, as President Trump threatens tariffs on imports from a variety of US trading partners and challenges the norms of late-twentieth-century multilateralism, and as nationalist politicians of different stripes ascend to power in a growing number of countries. This chapter asks whether these unilateralist, nationalist trends appearing to constitute a serious threat to globalization are a temporary aberration—and if so accounts for their incidence and timing—or whether they in fact herald the much-anticipated retreat from globalization.

By Barry Eichengreen in Towards a New Enlightenment? A Transcendent Decade.