They forgot to tell us globalization has a reverse gear. Now companies and countries need to get ready for the ‘inside economy.
One morning this past September, Pascal Lamy, the energetic Frenchman who heads the World Trade Organization, stood in front of a room of economists and began his annual recitation on the health of the world’s economy. “This year, like last, has been marked by extraordinary economic turbulence,” he began. “Sluggish economic growth rates, high unemployment, and newly released figures on world trade that are just as worrying.” It was not an unfamiliar diagnosis. But that last bit, the mention of the worrying new trade data, caught a number of ears.