What if we've reached peak globalisation?

With world trade contracting, the UK will need to promote renewables to reduce import dependency and boost regional economic growth

World trade has fallen by its largest amount since the financial crisis of 2008. The crash itself produced a significant shrinking of global trade - the sharpest since the Great Depression. At the time it was possible to believe that this was a temporary wobble. Ongoing technological change, from containerisation of freight transport to today's ubiquitous digital communications, would lock the economy into a path of deeper and deeper "globalisation", with international flows of goods, services and money overwhelming states and transforming societies.

The rapid recovery in global trade in the first years after the crash kindled a hope that the forward march of globalisation would continue. This now looks excessively optimistic.

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