“Despite all the talk of deglobalisation, if you just look at the numbers, what we are seeing in the last two and a half years is an acceleration of globalisation on the back of a huge commercial success from Chinese companies taking market share on the global stage,” Vincent Clerc, CEO of AP Moller-Maersk A/S, told investors last week.
As US President Donald Trump’s sweeping trade levies take effect and raise his country’s average duties to the highest since World War II, it’s easy to imagine globalisation is in reverse and that a new era of protectionism, fragmentation and reshoring has begun. Some of the gloom may be overdone.
Although the US was the chief architect of the multilateral trading system and has become the world’s most lucrative consumer market, it can’t by itself turn back the clock on global economic interdependence. Prosperity gains from comparative advantage and low-cost container shipping are too great for the rest of the world to ignore. Even as the US embraces self-sufficiency and reveals itself to be an unreliable economic partner, others are keen to keep trading.
