The future of the world economy is deglobalization
If you are a globalist — someone who believes humanity can best thrive with the abundant flow of goods, ideas and people across international borders — it has been a dark decade. And getting darker.
Driving the news: The list of affronts to a vision of liberal internationalism keeps getting longer. Xi and Putin. Brexit and Trump. Bolsonaro and Erdoğan and Orbán. Pandemic-closed borders, and now war in Eastern Europe.
Why it matters: As countries feel a greater need to become more self-reliant, that means tossing out some of the benefits of interdependence — which could shape the world economy of the 2020s and beyond.
It is the “corrosion of globalization” as Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, puts it in a humdinger of an essay in Foreign Affairs.
- “It now seems likely that the world economy really will split into blocs,” Posen writes, “each attempting to insulate itself from and then…
