Rather like the sandwich-board men proclaiming “the end is nigh”, who seemed to be ever present on the nation’s High Streets until well into 1980s, the worst warnings over a possible ‘end to globalisation’ have yet to come to pass.
It is true that trade flows have taken some very serious hits in recent years from the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and rising tensions between the US and China over the fate of Taiwan. But the net result of this, so far, has been to showcase the relative resilience of some tenets of globalised markets: for instance the manufacturing cheap electronics in China and shipping them via Amazon to, eventually, Budleigh Salterton.
All the same, an unsettling trend is clear. In essence, many aspects of the global economy suggest we are slowly turning back to a world of trade dominated by spheres of influence and monolithic economic blocs.
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