Understanding the New Global Economy

1

Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003057611-1

1 Towards a new global economy

Since the late 1980s, the rapid growth of cross-border economic activity, especially international trade, investment, and finance, has by far outstripped the growth of global production, a process for which the term ‘globalisation’ became popular in the 1990s. Economic globalisation, visualised in Figure 1.1 by a comprehensive index,¹ was at the heart of this process. However, since the great financial crisis of 2008–2009, and after about 30 years of economic ‘hyper-globalisation’, economic cross-border activities are stalling, though they remain at a high level. Is globalisation passé? The rapid increase in the internationalisation of data and knowledge as visualised ...