The Hyperglobalization of Trade and Its Future

Arvind Subramanian and Martin Kessler

No WP13-6, Working Paper Series from Peterson Institute for International Economics

Abstract: This paper describes seven salient features of trade integration in the 21st century: Trade integration has been more rapid than ever (hyperglobalization); it is dematerialized, with the growing importance of services trade; it is democratic, because openness has been embraced widely; it is criss-crossing because similar goods and investment flows now go from South to North as well as the reverse; it has witnessed the emergence of a mega-trader (China), the first since Imperial Britain; it has involved the proliferation of regional and preferential trade agreements and is on the cusp of mega-regionalism as the world's largest traders pursue such agreements with each other; and it is impeded by the continued existence of high barriers to trade in services. Going forward, the trading system will have to tackle three fundamental challenges: In developed countries, the domestic support for globalization needs to be sustained in the face of economic weakness and the reduced ability to maintain social insurance mechanisms. Second, China has become the world's largest trader and a major beneficiary of the current rules of the game. It will be called upon to shoulder more of the responsibilities of maintaining an open system. The third challenge will be to prevent the rise of mega-regionalism from leading to discrimination and becoming a source of trade conflicts. We suggest a way forward--including new areas of cooperation such as taxes--to maintain the open multilateral trading system and ensure that it benefits all countries.

Keywords: Globalization; Convergence; Inequalities; Multilateral Trading System; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F15 F42 F60 F68 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (33)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.piie.com/publications/working-papers/h ... trade-and-its-future (text/html)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iie:wpaper:wp13-6

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Peterson Institute for International Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peterson Institute webmaster ().