A provocative view of globalisation’s future

Adam Pilarski:

The past few decades are the age of globalisation. The world is getting smaller and much more interconnected. Trade has been growing in line with regional specialisation. These developments have been welcomed worldwide by economists, who always believe globalisation and the resulting trade will lead to a better allocation of scarce resources, the holy grail of our science. All those movements of people and goods have been a boon to aviation.

The fact that globalisation is not necessarily good for everybody has been also recognised for a long time. The Luddites were smashing machines two-and-a-half centuries ago protesting against progress, which they saw reducing their welfare. Recently, anti-globalisation movements have been gaining strength, asserting their influence via the political mechanism. Ironically, the two countries which introduced the free-trade ideology to the world and benefited for a long time from globalisation (the UK and US) have turned recently against these principles at the ballot boxes.

The negatives of worldwide globalisation have been widely discussed. While few people argue for downright isolationism, the trade-offs between the overall improved welfare of the world as a whole versus the local costs experienced in some places have been more in focus in the past few years.