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Economics

Chiuso con la deglobalizzazione?

Nov 25, 2022 Michael Spence

HONG KONG – Novembre è stato un mese straordinario. I leader mondiali si sono riuniti per quattro importanti incontri: l’incontro dell’ASEAN in Cambogia, il vertice del G20 in Indonesia, il forum della Cooperazione economica Asia-Pacifico (APEC) in Tailandia e la Conferenza delle Nazioni Unite sui cambiamenti climatici (COP27) in Egitto. Ciò che ha colpito non è stata la tempistica degli incontri, ma piuttosto il fatto di aver dato prova che si possa passare dal confronto a una rinnovata cooperazione nell’arena internazionale.

Negli ultimi anni l’economia globale sembra essersi allontanata dall’impegno e dalla collaborazione multilaterali, optando per una competizione alimentata dal nazionalismo. Alcuni, in particolare le economie emergenti, hanno tentato di resistere a questa tendenza, ad esempio rifiutandosi di sostenere le sanzioni occidentali contro la Russia. Ma tali sforzi sembrano aver avuto un impatto minimo.

Come hanno notato numerosi osservatori, un’inversione completa della globalizzazione sarebbe praticamente impossibile. Secondo una ricerca del McKinsey Global Institute, nessuna regione, né tanto meno nessun Paese, è vicina all’autosufficienza. Ma ciò non ha impedito ad alcuni Paesi e leader – in particolare gli Stati Uniti – di perseguirla. E anche la parziale deglobalizzazione che hanno perseguito avrebbe conseguenze di vasta portata, alcune delle quali – come l’aumento dell’inflazione e l’accresciuto rischio di indebitamento – stanno già diventando evidenti.

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Michael Spence

Writing for PS since 2008
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Michael Spence, a Nobel laureate in economics, is Professor of Economics Emeritus and a former dean of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He is Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Senior Adviser to General Atlantic, and Chairman of the firm’s Global Growth Institute. He serves on the Academic Committee at Luohan Academy, and chairs the Advisory Board of the Asia Global Institute. He was Chairman of the independent Commission on Growth and Development, an international body that from 2006-10 analyzed opportunities for global economic growth, and is the author of The Next Convergence: The Future of Economic Growth in a Multispeed World (Macmillan Publishers, 2012).

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0 Comments on this paragraph, 7 Comments on this article

ger hardy Nov 28, 2022

As has been noted in other comments on this thread this is indeed a false choice and there is an implication here that it is an obvious positive for all.

The other aspect I struggle with here in the 'globalization can only ever be good' debate is how it exactly squares with the man made climate change position?
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Meir Stieglitz Nov 28, 2022

No “turning away from confrontation toward renewed cooperation in the international arena” on the horizon. In order to achieve a renewed growing Globalization (the quantifiable aspect of Universalism) Humanity has to preform Global Tasks.
In 1989, as part of constituting the historically relevant principles of the Universalism as a System-of-Thought, I defined Global Task so: a task should be considered as global when it fulfils four (and a half) conditions:
1. Performing the task is necessary to confront and solve a situation that is posing a grave (potentially existential) danger and the risk is recognized as common, and relatively equal, by the majority of the significant actors in world politics.
2. In the context of world order, the danger confronted must be recognized by all the relevant (necessary for the solution) actors as surpassing the Survival Predicament (as defined by the Realist World View). In simple terms, the actors must estimate that the global danger pose a greater risk for them then the various threats emanating from other actors in the world system.
3. The global task cannot be performed and the danger, for humanity or specific actors, cannot be solved by the actions of some actors against others.
4. The completion of the task will not result in a radically more privileged relative position for some of the main global actors.
5. Accommodating, but not necessary, clause: the completion of the task necessitates the (relative) participation of all the major actors. The chances of a stable and long-term solution may be hindered if actions and contributions are limited to few of the major actors (“free-riders” problem).
Though the pandemic has created a sense of “Humanity’s doom” and thus galvanized global cooperation, it is not, yet, perceived as a Global Task - Nuclear Abolition and, to a lesser degree, turning Climate Change around should have been the primary Global Tasks of our time.
However, by now both sides tend to view the Ukrainian War as the “Battle of Our Time” – Hobbes’ Trumps Kant.
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Thaomas H Nov 28, 2022

A false choice. "Cooperation" is each country pursuing its own self interest as these coincide.
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vic lai Nov 26, 2022

Many of today's DM countries of course want our world to go back to the good old days of
(i) full globalization on steroids, in which they mostly keep occupying the highest-value-added and hence the most profitable parts of the global value chains (GVCs), while most of the EM countries keep toiling at the low-value-added and hence unprofitable parts of the GVCs, and are "disallowed" to climb up the GVC ladder, and
(ii) very cheap global energy prices, with the spot and futures prices of all the exported raw materials and products of the global energy and commodity cartels being more or less under the full control of the futures exchanges of the DM countries.
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But, as shown by
(i) the current Ukraine War in Europe, during which Russia demands her natural gas exported to the EU countries to be denominated and transacted in her own currency,
(ii) the recent "revolt" of OPEC+ against the US,
(iii) Indonesia's proposed formation of a new global nickel OPEC,
(iv) Zoltan Pozsar's recent prediction of the coming transformation of our global monetary system from BW II to BW III,
while many of the DM countries want our global economy to go back to the good old days of non-deglobalization, increasingly more and more EM countries are demanding their bigger and bigger fair shares in the final distribution of the global GVC cakes in the coming decades.
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As shown by US's highly profitable Apple Corporation over the past years (with her latest iphone 14 having no more awe-inspiring innovations as in the past), the DM countries have always been grabbing too large a proportion of the total value-added and hence profits of the global supply chains relative to the EM countries.
My guess is that, the coming global economic age will perhaps be recorded in future economic history as the Age of Revolt, during which the EM countries were constantly revolting against the DM countries, both economically (by striving hard to further improve their overall global terms of trade) and geopolitically (by working together to try to replace the US's hegemonic unilateralism by more peaceful global multilateralism).
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- vic lai Nov 28, 2022
  
  Many people have recently been concentrating on the rising trend of
  (i) global deglobalization, which is obviously coinciding with the new Anglo-Saxon-induced trend of anti-China global geopolitics, and
  (ii) American reshoring, which means hopefully making America great again, even though this also means, this time, even the US's traditional "close" ally countries, like today's Taiwan and Germany, will also be (seriously) hurt as a result.
  But another global trend seems to have just cropped up and has since been gaining more and more strength as well ------ global de-dollarization.
  The dollar here refers of course to the US dollar, and the new trend of de-dollarization will perhaps be an even more important part of the coming Age of Revolt than that of deglobalization.
  ---
  (i) Russia's forced denomination and transaction of her exported natural gas to the EU countries in her own currency, the Russian ruble, in the ongoing Ukraine war, is the first bold attempt in the new global trend of de-dollarization.
  (ii) It will be followed by the coming closer and closer cooperation of all kinds between China and Saudi Arabia (and, if successful, later between China and many other OPEC+ countries also).
  Saudi Arabia will be accepting more and more China's yuan as payment for her exported oil, by circumventing the US dollar, and uses the yuan to buy back China's exported merchandises.
  As time goes by, China will then be "forced" to further develop and deepen her own bond and futures markets, and to further relax her capital control.
  ---
  Given the slow but sure global trend of tapering of the use of petro-dollar, Bretton Woods II will gradually be supplemented by Bretton Woods III, and the hegemonic US dollar will in the future be relying more and more on the sole credit and faith of the US federal government and central bank, and will no longer be supported by oil, or other commodities and energies.
  (Perhaps the US may try to re-link the US dollar with food in the global arena, using food-dollar to gradually replace the slowly disappearing petro-dollar.)
  Considering what the US had done to both Iraq and Libya in the past, to prevent the linking of oil to other non-dollar currencies, it remains to be seen what she will be doing to Saudi Arabia (and to both China and Russia) in the coming years.
  ---
  The new trend of de-dollarization will be facilitated also by the US's latest abuse of her hegemonic dollar in the global arena, like
  (a) the confiscation or permanent freezing of Russia's public and private US-dollar-denominated financial assets and properties as a result of the Ukraine War,
  (b) the eviction of many of Russia's commercial banks out of the global Swift system,
  (c) the recent thinly-traded "riskless" US treasury market, due to a lack of global market liquidity (which is also shown by China's latest RRR drop for her commercial banks), which in turn has partly been a result of the massive net-selling of US treasuries by both Japan and China,
  (d) the over-ambitious use of MMT-like new printing of US dollars by the US federal government (-cum-US Fed-cum-US Congress) to try to prevent the realization of another Great Depression in the US, as a result of the sudden pandemic breakout in the country, thereby further debasing, and reducing the global credibility of, the US dollar,
  (e) the US's reshoring strive is also reducing the use of the US dollar in the global financial markets in the coming decades.
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  - vic lai Nov 28, 2022
    
    The coming "Age of Revolt" will probably be coinciding with the coming "Age of De-Everything," like de-globalization, de-dollarization, de-financialization, de-macroeconomic-virtualization," de-privatization, de-liberalization, and de-carbonization.
    As pitifully shown by the ongoing energy crises in the European Continent, which has mostly been a result of too-fast de-carbonization being attempted in many of the EU countries in recent years, the coming acts of de-everything should globally progress in a relatively slow manner, to much reduce the chance of the sudden cropping up of any non-trivial and harmful unexpected consequences.
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Just Wondering Nov 25, 2022

McKinsey and any other consulting firms, say, by way of their research, whatever they’ve been paid to say. Who paid for their research? Regardless of whether it is accurate in this instance, I see it intellectually inappropriate to premise this opinion piece on a McKinsey research article.
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