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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At first glance, the recent raid on Capvision, a Shanghai consultancy, looks similar to the raids on foreign firms Mintz Group and Bain & Company. But there are reasons to separate Beijing's crackdown on Capvision. For starters, Capvision is Chinese and its shareholders and investors include a network of remarkably high profile and state-connected individuals and companies.