Author: Stephen King

Publisher: Yale University Press

Comments: Globalisation is not new: in the late 19th century, capital moved freely around the world, goods were traded across national boundaries and people migrated on a proportionally far greater scale than they do today. All that ended with the first world war. Trade and economies recovered and globalisation began again spurred more recently by the internet and the spread of liberal capitalism. According to Stephen King, an economist at HSBC, one of the most global banks, this may be due to change again. Technological development has led to robots which may replace at home cheap labour in the developing world with subsequent impact on global supply chains; the internet has also created inequality with increasing divisions between “haves” and “have nots”; furthermore, a resurgence of migration has caused a political backlash on both economic and cultural grounds with a rise of populism; geopolitical shifts may also have an effect. One consequence is that cooperative arrangements between nation states will be less frequent and more challenging. “Conflict, he says, at least in the economic sphere, will become ever more frequent”.