The World Trade Organization's 12th Ministerial Conference. 14th June, 2022. Credit: WTO/Jessica Genoud via Flickr
The return of high inflation in many developed economies seems to have surprised central banks and has quickly become people’s leading economic worry. While monetary tightening is necessary, the role of structural factors warrants attention, too. Specifically, besides pandemic-related supply-chain disruptions and the energy and food-price shocks amplified by the Ukraine war, policymakers must also acknowledge more explicitly the inflationary consequences of deglobalization.
During the two decades before the 2008 global financial crisis, globalization seemed unstoppable. The volume of global trade increased more than twice as fast as world GDP, as liberalization of trade and investment in developing Asia, Latin America, and Central and Eastern Europe contributed to a boom in cross-border reallocation of production flows of final and intermediate goods.
The hyper-globalization of this period, and notably the integration of China into world trade and
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Did Eric Dai expose a Chinese scheme to steal critical military technology? Or did he steal millions of dollars from a Chinese company by exploiting geopolitical tensions? It's not entirely clear, but Dai's saga hits all the high notes of current U.S.-China tensions, including convoluted plots to illicitly acquire U.S. semiconductor technology and extraterritorial schemes to harass, intimidate and coerce the Chinese diaspora. What is clear is that, for Dai, who founded a successful Chinese investment firm but is now seeking asylum in the U.S., it feels like World War III.
The former National Intelligence Officer for East Asia talks about why engagement hasn’t failed, it just hasn’t succeeded yet; why strategic empathy is so hard to do; and why the U.S. needs an approach to...