Deglobalisation will hurt growth everywhere | Kenneth Rogoff

The US has more to lose from rising economic nationalism than some of its politicians realise

The post-pandemic world economy seems likely to be a far less globalised economy, with political leaders and publics rejecting openness in a manner unlike anything seen since the tariff wars and competitive devaluations of the 1930s. And the byproduct will be not just slower growth but a significant fall in national incomes for all but perhaps the largest and most diversified economies.

In his prescient 2001 book The End of Globalisation, the Princeton economic historian Harold James showed how an earlier era of global economic and financial integration collapsed under the pressures of unexpected events during the Great Depression of the 1930s, culminating in the second world war. Today, the Covid-19 pandemic appears to be accelerating another withdrawal from globalisation.

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