The Globalisation Litany. CEPS Commentary October 2016

One refrain heard over the last few decades has been that the dominant trend is ‘globalisation’. The world economy was integrating as trade increased year after year more than overall income. But over the last few years this trend has stopped. Trade growth has dramatically slowed and is no longer much higher than income growth, which itself has slowed down. This slowdown in trade is seen as dangerous for the proponents of globalisation. All the major international institutions have recently published studies of the slowdown in trade, almost invariably ending with calls for action to reverse the phenomenon to get globalisation back on track