COVID-19: Is this the end of globalization?

Author(s):  
Shahar Hameiri

Lockdowns and border closures to manage the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic have caused the greatest global economic shock since the Great Depression. Does this also signal the end of economic globalization, the most significant trend of the past forty years? And if so, what kind of global political economy is emerging from the wreckage? In this article, I argue that COVID-19 is mainly intensifying pre-existing trends, set in motion by the global financial crisis of 2008 and the People’s Republic of China (PRC)’s economic rise. The disruptions to global supply chains wrought by COVID-19 have combined with rising United States–PRC rivalry, growing disaffection with the distributional impacts of global value chains, and automation to catalyze the turn away from globalized production. Meanwhile, amid the economic doom and gloom, financial markets are booming, high on the central banks’ liquidity injections to which they have been addicted since the 2008 crisis. As in the decade since the 2008 crisis, booming markets will likely deepen inequality and resentment, fuelling economic nationalism and eroding support for globalization even more. The governments of relatively small and open economies, such as Australia and Canada, will need to guide their economies more purposefully or find themselves at the mercy of the increasingly confrontational, yet domestically fragile, United States and the PRC.

2016 ◽  
pp. 26-46
Author(s):  
Marcin Jan Flotyński

The global financial crisis in 2007–2009 began a period of high volatility on the financial markets. Specifically, it caused an increased amplitude of fluctuations of the level of gross domestic products, the level of investment and consumption and exchange rates in particular countries. To address the adverse market circumstances, governments and central banks took actions in order to bolster the weakening global economy. The aim of this article is to present the anti-crisis actions in the United States and selected member states of the European Union, including Poland, and an assessment of their efficiency. The analysis conducted indicates that generally the actions taken in the United States in response to the crisis were faster and more adequate to the existing circumstances than in the European Union.


Author(s):  
Ravi Roy ◽  
Thomas D. Willett

The size and scope of financial sectors throughout the world have grown exponentially in tandem with the rise of globalization and increased capital mobility. The terms “economic globalization” and “financialization” are often discussed as inextricably related phenomena. Although the rapid increase in the number and variety of financial services and products during the past four decades has helped spur economic growth and create wealth on an unprecedented scale, the devastating fallout from the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, and the economic turbulence that followed, demonstrates how poorly managed financial sectors can simultaneously cause enormous pain. This chapter argues that if the opportunities created by economic globalization and financialization are to be maximized, while at the same tempering volatile financial markets, then the global financial system (and the national economies connected with it) must be fundamentally restructured. A number of ways that should be taken under consideration are discussed.


2020 ◽  
Vol 114 ◽  
pp. 23-32
Author(s):  
Henry Gao

Since its accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), China's exports have been growing exponentially. In 2009, China became the world's top goods exporter. Four years later, China unseated the United States as the top trading nation in the world. In contrast to the burgeoning Chinese economy, the United States and Europe have been suffering from economic decline since the global financial crisis in 2008. China regards its rise as a long overdue restoration of its rightful position, as it has been the largest economy in the world for most of its history, except the brief aberration over the past 150 years. The Western powers, however, view China's rapid development with suspicion, as they attribute China's success mostly to its state-led development model, with state-owned enterprises, massive subsidies, and heavy government intervention playing a major role.


2013 ◽  
pp. 152-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. Senchagov

Due to Russia’s exit from the global financial crisis, the fiscal policy of withdrawing windfall spending has exhausted its potential. It is important to refocus public finance to the real economy and the expansion of domestic demand. For this goal there is sufficient, but not realized financial potential. The increase in fiscal spending in these areas is unlikely to lead to higher inflation, given its actual trend in the past decade relative to M2 monetary aggregate, but will directly affect the investment component of many underdeveloped sectors, as well as the volume of domestic production and consumer demand.


2020 ◽  
Vol 119 (820) ◽  
pp. 310-316
Author(s):  
Alasdair Roberts

Since the 1990s and Bill Clinton’s embrace of key parts of Ronald Reagan’s legacy, mainstream US governance has been guided by a bipartisan consensus around a formula of shrinking the federal government’s responsibilities and deregulating the economy. Hailed as the ultimate solution to the age-old problem of governing well, the formula was exported to the developing world as the Washington Consensus. Yet growing political polarization weakened the consensus, and in a series of three major crises over the past two decades—9/11, the global financial crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic—US policymakers opted for pragmatism rather than adherence to the old formula, which appears increasingly inadequate to cope with current governance challenges.


Author(s):  
Steven L Schwarcz

Securitisation represents a significant worldwide source of capital market financing. European investors commonly invest in asset-backed securities issued in U.S. securitisation transactions, and vice versa One of the key goals of the European Commission's proposed Capital Markets Union (CMU) is to further facilitate securitisation as a source of capital market financing as a viable alternative to bank-based finance for companies operating in the EU. To that end, this chapter explains securitisation and attempts to put its rise, its decline after the global financial crisis, and its recent CMU-inspired revival into a global perspective. It examines not only securitisation's relationship to the financial crisis but also post-crisis comparative regulatory approaches in the EU and the United States.


Thesis Eleven ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 072551362110533
Author(s):  
Henry Maher

The survival of neoliberal forms of governance after their apparent repudiation during the Global Financial Crisis is a problem that continues to generate significant scholarly controversy. One of the most influential accounts of the survival of neoliberalism in the crisis draws on Michel Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics to claim that states intervening to support financial markets during the crisis was simply the neoliberal system working as expected. Returning to Foucault’s original text, I argue this account constitutes a systematic misreading because it treats Foucault as having developed an instrumentalist theory of the neoliberal state, a possibility Foucault explicitly rejected. I suggest that the reasons that led Foucault to reject an instrumentalist theory of the state remain just as relevant today, and accordingly argue for a return to Foucault’s methodological decision to treat neoliberalism not as a theory of state but as a discourse which constructs a novel bio-political governmentality.


Author(s):  
Christoph Nitschke ◽  
Mark Rose

U.S. history is full of frequent and often devastating financial crises. They have coincided with business cycle downturns, but they have been rooted in the political design of markets. Financial crises have also drawn from changes in the underpinning cultures, knowledge systems, and ideologies of marketplace transactions. The United States’ political and economic development spawned, guided, and modified general factors in crisis causation. Broadly viewed, the reasons for financial crises have been recurrent in their form but historically specific in their configuration: causation has always revolved around relatively sudden reversals of investor perceptions of commercial growth, stock market gains, monetary availability, currency stability, and political predictability. The United States’ 19th-century financial crises, which happened in rapid succession, are best described as disturbances tied to market making, nation building, and empire creation. Ongoing changes in America’s financial system aided rapid national growth through the efficient distribution of credit to a spatially and organizationally changing economy. But complex political processes—whether Western expansion, the development of incorporation laws, or the nation’s foreign relations—also underlay the easy availability of credit. The relationship between systemic instability and ideas and ideals of economic growth, politically enacted, was then mirrored in the 19th century. Following the “Golden Age” of crash-free capitalism in the two decades after the Second World War, the recurrence of financial crises in American history coincided with the dominance of the market in statecraft. Banking and other crises were a product of political economy. The Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2008 not only once again changed the regulatory environment in an attempt to correct past mistakes, but also considerably broadened the discursive situation of financial crises as academic topics.


2019 ◽  
pp. 94-112
Author(s):  
Edward Fieldhouse ◽  
Jane Green ◽  
Geoffrey Evans ◽  
Jonathan Mellon ◽  
Christopher Prosser ◽  
...  

The Global Financial Crisis, which began in 2007–8, was the most significant financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and acted as a large shock to British politics. The economic vote is usually thought about as a short-term mechanism: a reward or punishment for the incumbent depending on recent economic conditions. In this chapter we examine how this shock played a role in the outcome of the 2015 General Election, seven years after the crisis began. The Global Financial Crisis continued to affect voting behaviour in 2015 for two reasons: first, it did long-lasting damage to perceptions of Labour’s economic competence, and second, it created a political opportunity for the Conservatives to blame the previous Labour government for the aftermath of the financial crisis.


2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 151
Author(s):  
Hong-Yul Jeong

<p><em>Shipbuilding industry, having a great ripple effect on national economy, has been fostered by some countries as the national key industries. Korea also has supported shipbuilding industry as one of the industries politically fostered by the state. Accordingly, the shipbuilding industry of Korea has started to developed since 1970’s, reaching the world’s top position in 2000</em><em>’</em><em>s with reference to all the relevant indices.</em></p><p><em>However, after the global financial crisis in 2008, the shipbuilding industries of Korea focused on offshore plants, resulting in huge deficit and being outranked by China.</em></p><p><em>In this article, the past growing procedure of Korea’s shipbuilding industry was briefly reviewed, and the future plans for regaining the past glories as the shipbuilding power were sought.</em><em></em></p>


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