Donald Trump is not turning his back on globalisation – he wants a free ride
Andrew Sheng says globalisation is here to stay, and the danger for the world is that its detractors – by refusing to pay their share for the public goods that an open system depends on – will make the system even less fair
Depending on who you talk to, globalisation happened either in 1492, when Christopher Columbus discovered America in search of the Orient, or sometime in the middle of 19th century, when America decided to look outwards for trade after its civil war.
By 2000, when the movement of trade, technology, finance and investments across the globe seemed unstoppable, Thomas Friedman celebrated a borderless world as the driver of global success in his bestseller, The World Is Flat. Globalisation had lifted billions from poverty and the logic of free trade and capital flows was accepted from Beijing to Zanzibar. But in 2007, when the North Atlantic financial crisis revealed the flaws of excessive financialisation, doubts about globalisation began to creep in.
Globalisation, in the form of the spread of trade, money, people and information, is inevitable, essentially because of expanding demographics and technology. Human beings migrate all over the world, and it was technology – the invention of railways, ships, aircraft and now information communications – that accelerated the spread of global ideas and genes.
Technology also enabled the dramatic cutting of transaction costs, making markets and prices global.
As Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, author of Globalisation and Its Discontents, aptly put it, globalisation is either positive or negative, depending on how it is managed.