Has globalisation passed its peak?

Certainly, you’ve heard of globalisation. But what about deglobalisation? Supply chain disruptions, surging costs, shortages — these daily realities could all be connected to a process known as deglobalisation. Some experts even see the war in Ukraine, combined with the pandemic, as marking a turning point toward a deglobalised era. But what shape would this new world take? Experts typically describe three types of globalisation: economic, social and political globalisation.

Economic globalisation is the integration of the world economy in terms of trade. This process certainly has its share of advocates and critics. Globalisation lifts people out of poverty and increases their standard of living, proponents proclaim. Yet the rewards of economic globalisation are not shared equally. “Internationally as well as in industrialised societies, inequality has increased,” confirms Andreas Wirsching, a history professor at LMU in Munich. Economic globalisation has resulted in “many winners, but also many losers — that is undeniable.”

Downsides of globalisation also include social and ecological consequences, points out Cora Jungbluth, an economist and senior expert at Bertelsmann Stiftung, an institute in Germany. Workers in high-income countries have seen jobs moving to lower-cost countries, while “multinational corporations have outsourced more dirty production steps to developing and emerging countries, thus contributing to environmental issues there.”

Just as globalisation reflects a process of increasing economic interdependence, deglobalisation then marks a retreat from global economic integration. And there are indications this has been happening for some time already. A key measure of globalisation — trade’s share of global GDP — peaked in 2008 at the start of the Great Recession. “The ratio of exports to GDP around the world rose pretty significantly in the 1990s and 2000s. But since the 2008 and 2009 financial crisis, those measures have been flat or down,” explains Douglas Irwin, an economics professor at Dartmouth College in the US. Irwin and other experts also note that this has been linked to populism and protectionist economic policies. But there are other major factors putting the brakes on globalisation.

Economically, the coronavirus crisis was infamous for supply chain disruptions. Who could forget the resulting shortages, price increases, hoarding — that moment when you got down to your last roll of toilet paper? Such disruption spurred a fundamental change to the design of those supply chains, explains Megan Greene, an economist and senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School. “The pandemic shifted a trend away from just-in-time manufacturing more toward holding inventories,” Greene says. She describes this newer contingency system as “global supply chain plus backup plans,” so firms are not left in the lurch when there are global supply chain disruptions.

Within this “supply chain plus” model, Jungbluth adds that countries and companies have been considering shortening supply chains: “Maybe take them back home, keep production of key input and technologies closer to their production sites.” This results in more resiliency on the supply side — which is, in essence, a move away from globalisation, with its focus on efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

Consumers have felt the impacts of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, along with subsequent sanctions, above all in the energy and agricultural product sectors. “We have a lack of necessary energy imports, because Europe needs fossil energy from Russia,” says Thiess Petersen, an economist and colleague of Jungbluth at Bertelsmann Stiftung. “And the entire world needs agricultural products from Russia and Ukraine.”

Russia and Ukraine are very significant global exporters of wheat and sunflower oil. Irwin confirms that disruption of exports due to the war and sanctions is resulting in some price increases. “We’ve seen commodity prices going up quite a bit as a result of the war: wheat prices, oil prices (at least initially).” That drives up prices for consumers, which in turn fuels inflation. On the flip side, sanctions against Russia are isolating that large economy from the rest of the world. Economists see here not only a disintegration of interconnected markets, but also an unspooling of the progress that globalisation has brought with it.

Shortages and high prices of basic foodstuffs resulting from the Russian invasion of Ukraine will be felt not only in high-income countries, but also in developing and emerging countries. For countries highly dependent on such imports of cheap flour and oil, this “may even lead to famine,” Jungbluth adds.

The Great Recession, ensuing tariff-oriented protectionism, supply chain restructuring due to the pandemic, disintegration of interlinked commodity markets because of the Ukraine war — Petersen concludes, “Maybe now we are at the beginning of a kind of deglobalisation.” Economist Greene points out that there is no index to measure globalisation. She challenges a prevailing narrative, promoted when the pandemic began, of increased onshoring, nearshoring and regionalisation of global supply chains. This narrative is not backed up by many gauges of globalisation, for example survey data.

“In the latest survey conducted by the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce, zero US firms said that they were going to onshore operations — that is, move out of China and come back to the US,” Greene points out. She adds that although long-term investments in China have continued apace, short-term investments started being pulled once Russia invaded Ukraine, as one indication of a possible turn. But even Greene concedes, “The peak of globalisation is well behind us — I would say that we’re seeing globalisation progress much more slowly than we had before, but we’re not in deglobalisation territory yet.” Western sanctions against Russia and capital flight from China point to an overarching trend, Jungbluth believes. “In recent years, countries have been trying to reduce so-called critical dependencies, which can also lead to deglobalisation.”

Irwin draws parallels to the Cold War era, when “certain countries that were politically aligned also became more economically aligned, and not as integrated with others.”

Jungbluth, Petersen and other economists believe the world is currently headed toward two distinct geopolitical economic blocs: one consisting of democratic, market-economy countries (the US, European Union, Japan, South Korea, Oceania, North and South America) and another bloc of autocratic states (China, Russia and their most important trading partners). “What we’ve been seeing is a comeback of geopolitics, and these trends also lead to deglobalisation — trying to reduce economic dependencies from less like-minded countries,” Jungbluth says.