NEW DELHI — How will Covid-19 affect developing countries’ growth prospects? The answer will depend largely on how globalization — and intellectual support for it — evolves in the pandemic’s aftermath. The prospects are not encouraging.
Even before the pandemic struck, the global merchandise export-to-GDP ratio had been declining for the first time since World War II, falling by about five percentage points since 2008 to about 20 percent this year.
This is not the first time that the world has de-globalized. Between World War I and the eve of World War II, world trade collapsed, and the export-to-GDP ratio fell from a peak of 16 percent in 1913 to just over 6 percent. In John Maynard Keynes’s memorable words, this contraction was the result of “the projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion.”
Today’s deglobalization was brought on by other factors. For starters, n
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