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Worldwide Network Showing Globalization Computing And Planet

Item Link: Access the Resource

Date of Publication: March 28

Year of Publication: 2020

Publisher: Local Futures

Author(s): Walden Bello

Tens of millions of people lost their jobs, with 25 million in China alone in the second half of 2008. Air cargo plunged 20 percent in one year. Global supply chains, many of whose links were in China, were severely disrupted.

The Economist lamented that the “integration of the world economy is in retreat on almost every front,” adding that “some critics of capitalism seem happy about it—like Walden Bello, a Philippine economist, who can perhaps claim to have coined the word [deglobalization] with his book, Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy.”

Challenging Globalization

What was this “deglobalization” the Economist was so wary about?

It was, among other things, about making the domestic market again the center of gravity of the economy rather than the global market. And to do this, it not only proposed using tariffs and quotas to preserve local industry and agriculture from being overrun by the products of transnational corporations, but also putting into effect an activist trade policy to build up the capacity to support the national economy in a sustainable way.

But it was not simply specific policy proposals that the partisans of globalization feared but its fundamental perspective, which questioned the very basis of social relations under capitalism.

Read the full article here.

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