The End of Globalization?

Global trade, exports from China and commodity prices are in decline – and these trends are interconnected, argues Daniel Gros for Project Syndicate. Some analysts contend that globalization is dead, and Gros offers a reminder that globalization is not limited to trade: “Globalization entails many other features, including the surge in cross-border financial transactions and tourism, data exchange, and other economic activities.” Globalization also encompasses communications, tourism and cultural movement, immigration and security interventions. He suggests that economic “interconnections have fed back into trade, as they have enabled the emergence of global value chains, whereby different steps of the production process occur in different countries.” Global value chains have little impact on large, developed trading economies, and Chinese exports increasingly include more high value added components made in China, notes Gros, and he anticipates a rebalancing of trade from emerging economies to the larger industrial powers if commodity prices remain low. – YaleGlobal