32.25.02 · world-history / globalization

Globalization — trade, finance, networks, and backlash

shipped3 tiersLean: none

Anchor (Master): Frieden, Global Capitalism (Norton); O'Rourke & Williamson, Globalization and History (MIT Press); Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Belknap)

Intuition Beginner

After the Soviet Union fell in 1991, the world's economies stitched themselves together faster than ever before. Factories in one country assembled parts from a dozen others. Money moved across borders in milliseconds. A shipping container could travel from Shanghai to Hamburg for less than the truck ride to the port. For thirty years the dominant assumption was that more connection meant more prosperity.

Then the seams began to tear. Workers in rich countries saw wages stall while financiers grew rich. A housing collapse in Florida froze credit in London and Frankfurt. A virus in Wuhan emptied shelves in New York. Voters began electing leaders who promised tariffs, walls, and a retreat from the global order their grandparents had built.

This unit looks at globalization's depth, not its mere existence. The companion unit 32.25.01 covered the politics, the IMF, and the post-colonial debate. Here we measure how tightly the world was knitted together, why the knitting produced strain, and why the 2010s and 2020s produced a backlash that may be reversing it.

Visual Beginner

Figure: globalization's arc, 1991–2024. Integration rises to a 2008 peak, fractures in the financial crisis, and bends toward deglobalization in the 2010s–2020s as trade openness falls, tariffs rise, and populist vote-shares climb.

Year	Marker
1991	Soviet dissolution; India liberalizes its economy
1995	World Trade Organization created
2001	China joins the WTO
2008	Global financial crisis
2016	Brexit referendum; Trump elected on a tariff platform
2020	COVID-19 supply-chain shock

Worked example Beginner

Three numbers capture how deep globalization ran, and what it cost when it cracked.

Step 1: Trade doubled its weight. In 1990, world trade — exports plus imports — was about 38 percent of world GDP. By 2008 it had climbed to about 61 percent. The world economy had become roughly 1.6 times as trade-dependent in eighteen years. Goods that used to be made in one place were now assembled across many.

Step 2: China's income multiplied fortyfold. China's GDP per capita was about $318 in 1990. B y 2022 i tw a s ab o u t$ 12,720. That is roughly a fortyfold rise, the fastest sustained lift in recorded economic history, made possible by export factories feeding global supply chains.

Step 3: The rescue was enormous. When the 2008 crisis hit, the US government committed about $700 billion through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to backstop the banks. That single sum was larger than the annual GDP of most countries on Earth.

Reading the numbers. The first two figures describe integration; the third describes its cost when the system broke. Trade depth, China's rise, and the bailout are not three separate stories. They are one story measured at different points.

Check your understanding Beginner

Exercise 1 (multiple choice). World trade (exports plus imports) as a share of world GDP was about 38% in 1990. What was it at the 2008 peak?

A) ~20% B) ~45% C) ~61% D) ~90%

Answer

C) ~61%. World trade openness rose from roughly 38% of world GDP in 1990 to about 61% at the 2008 peak, before falling back after the crisis.

Exercise 2 (true/false). China's GDP per capita was higher in 1990 than in 2022.

Answer

False. China's GDP per capita rose from about $318 in 1990 t o ab o u t$ 12,720 in 2022, roughly a fortyfold increase driven by export-led integration into global supply chains.

Exercise 3 (short). Name two events after 2016 that signaled a backlash against globalization.

Answer

The 2016 Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump on a tariff-and-renegotiation platform both qualify. The 2020 COVID supply-chain shock and the subsequent wave of "friend-shoring" and industrial policy are also valid.

Formal definition Intermediate+

Precise terms let us separate what globalization did from what it was blamed for. The post-1991 wave is best understood through the measurable depth of integration rather than through slogans about openness.

Trade openness measures how exposed an economy is to international exchange:

Openness_{t} = \frac{X _{t} + M _{t}}{GDP _{t}}

where $X_{t}$ is exports and $M_{t}$ is imports in year $t$ . Small open economies (Singapore, Vietnam) post ratios above 150%; large continental ones (the United States) sit near 25%. The world aggregate rose from about $0.38$ in 1990 to about $0.61$ in 2008.

Financial integration is the legal and technical freedom for capital to move across borders: foreign direct investment (FDI), portfolio equity and bond flows, cross-border bank lending, and remittances. A capital account is open when residents and foreigners can acquire assets in either direction without permit; it is closed (or managed) when the state restricts those flows.

Global value chain (GVC). A production network in which the stages of making a good — design, components, assembly, marketing — are located in different countries to exploit local cost and skill differences. A smartphone's chips may be designed in California, fabricated in Taiwan, assembled in China, and sold in Germany, with each border crossing recorded as trade.

Terms of trade is the ratio of a country's export prices to its import prices. A decline means a country must export more to buy the same volume of imports — the long-run grievance of commodity exporters, and central to dependency-theory claims about the core-periphery hierarchy.

Gini coefficient. The standard measure of income or wealth inequality within a population, ranging from $0$ (perfect equality) to $1$ (one household receives all income). Formally it is one half of the relative mean absolute difference:

G = \frac{1}{2 μ} E [∣ x_{i} - x_{j} ∣]

where $μ$ is mean income and the expectation is taken over random pairs of individuals $i, j$ . A Gini above $0.4$ is conventionally read as "high inequality." China's Gini rose from roughly $0.30$ in 1980 to roughly $0.47$ by 2020 — the within-country price of its export-led convergence, and the empirical bridge to Piketty's $r > g$ tendency discussed below.

Reshoring / friend-shoring describe the deliberate relocation of supply chains back home or to allied economies to reduce dependence on geopolitical rivals, reversing decades of offshoring.

Deglobalization is a sustained fall in the trade-openness ratio accompanied by rising trade barriers, capital controls, and immigration restriction. Whether the 2020s qualify is contested: trade in goods plateaued after 2008 even as digital data flows kept climbing, fitting a "slowbalization" thesis better than full reversal.

Populism, as used here, is a political style that frames politics as a moral struggle between a corrupt elite and a virtuous people, typically targeting the very institutions — supranational courts, trade bodies, central banks — that the globalized order built.

Counterexamples to common slips

Slip 1: "Globalization means free trade." Trade openness and trade freedom are related but distinct. China is highly trade-open yet uses state subsidies, forced technology transfer, and capital controls extensively. The United States is less trade-open than Germany despite a more laissez-faire reputation.

Slip 2: "The 2008 crisis proved globalization failed." The crisis originated in a lightly regulated national financial sector (US mortgages) and spread through globally integrated banks. It indicted financial deregulation, not trade in goods. Goods trade collapsed as a consequence of the credit freeze, not as a cause.

Slip 3: "Deglobalization is well underway." By most hard measures — trade volumes, FDI stock, digital data flows — globalization plateaued after 2008 rather than reversed. Full deglobalization is a rhetorical claim of the 2020s; the data supports a rebalancing, not a retreat to autarky.

Comparative framework Intermediate+

Two research programmes read the same post-1991 record to opposite conclusions. Holding them side by side is the most honest way to see what is actually contested.

The liberal-integrationist position (Bhagwati 2004, Wolf 2004, the Economist tradition) holds that deeper integration raised aggregate human welfare. Its evidentiary core is absolute poverty reduction: the share of humanity living on under $1.90/day fell from about 36% in 1990 to about 10% in 2015, driven overwhelmingly by export-led growth in China, Vietnam, and Bangladesh. On this view the WTO's non-discriminatory rules and the explosion of GVCs let capital find the world's most productive labor, and the poor of Asia were the winners. Inequality within rich countries is acknowledged but treated as a domestic distribution problem solvable by retraining and transfers — a failure of politics, not of openness.

The structural-critique and dependency position (Stiglitz 2002, Rodrik 2011, the world-systems tradition descending from Wallerstein and Cardoso) reads the same data as a story of power rather than efficiency. GVCs are governed by lead firms in the Global North that capture design, branding, and intellectual-property rents while consigning the South to low-wage assembly. Gains accrue to asset-owners because capital is mobile and labor is not — Piketty's inequality $r > g$ is the formal statement of this tendency ^{[Piketty 2014]}. The 1997 Asian crisis and the 2008 crisis both exposed a system that socialized the losses of financial integration while privatizing its gains. Dependency theory adds that commodity exporters face structurally adverse terms of trade, reproducing colonial-era hierarchies under corporate form.

Where they genuinely disagree. The schools do not merely weigh the same ledger differently; they measure different things. Integrationists aggregate across people (global welfare rises). Structuralists disaggregate within countries (who captures the surplus). They also disagree about counterfactuals: integrationists compare actually-existing openness to autarky; structuralists compare it to a managed alternative (capital controls, industrial policy) that was politically available but not chosen.

Bridge. This comparative framework builds toward the Master-tier analysis, where the two positions are tested against the 2008 crisis and the 2010s backlash. The central insight is that trade openness and financial integration are not the same thing: a country can accept one while restraining the other, as Malaysia did in 1997 and China did throughout. Putting these together — the integrationist claim that openness raises aggregate income and the structural-critique claim that its distribution depends on institutions — generalises to the Master question of why the backlash came when it did. The tension appears again in 32.26.01, where the twenty-first-century order is read as a contest between an integrating economy and fragmenting politics.

Case study: how a local shock goes global Intermediate+

The signature feature of deep globalization is that local shocks now propagate worldwide through tightly coupled networks. Two crises a decade apart show the mechanism in different registers, and neither reduces to mere "trade."

2008: propagation through finance. The crisis began in a single national market — US subprime mortgages — but spread within days because the world's banks held collateralized debt obligations backed by those mortgages, and because trade credit, the short-term financing that funds roughly 90% of world goods trade, froze as banks stopped trusting each other's solvency. When Lehman Brothers failed on 15 September 2008, container shipping rates collapsed; the Baltic Dry Index, a measure of bulk-shipping costs, fell by roughly 94% from peak to trough within months. Factory output fell across Asia not because Western consumers instantly stopped wanting goods, but because the letters of credit that funded the shipments stopped being honored. The channel was financial integration, not trade policy — which is why protectionist responses could not have contained it.

2020: propagation through logistics. The COVID shock was physical rather than financial. Lockdowns closed ports and factories; just-in-time inventory systems, optimized over three decades to carry minimal stock, had no slack to absorb the disruption. A chip shortage idled auto plants in Germany and the United States; a container imbalance pushed the cost of shipping a 40-foot box from Asia to North America from roughly $1, 500 p r e - p an d e mi c t oo v er$ 20,000 at the 2021 peak. The bullwhip effect — small fluctuations in final demand amplified into huge swings upstream — turned a manageable disruption into a global goods shortage.

The common lesson. Both crises revealed the same structural property: efficiency and resilience trade off against each other. A tightly coupled system minimizes cost in normal times but transmits shocks without damping. The political consequence is that voters and policymakers who had assumed global supply chains were purely beneficial began, after 2008 and again after 2020, to price in fragility — the intellectual foundation of the friend-shoring and industrial-policy turn of the 2020s that the next unit takes up 32.26.01.

Exercises Intermediate+

Exercise 1 (Easy, numeric). China joined the WTO in 2001; its GDP per capita was about $1, 050 t ha t y e a r an d ab o u t$ 12,720 in 2022. Estimate the total multiplication factor and the approximate compound annual growth rate.

Answer

Per-capita income rose by a factor of about $12, 720/1, 050 \approx 12$ over 21 years. The compound annual rate is $2112 \approx 1.13$ , roughly a 13% annual real growth in USD terms — an extraordinary sustained rate.

Exercise 2 (Easy, true/false). "World trade openness was lower in 1990 than in 2008." State whether this is true and give the approximate figures.

Answer

True. World exports-plus-imports rose from roughly 38% of world GDP in 1990 to about 61% at the 2008 peak.

Exercise 3 (Medium). Distinguish trade openness from financial integration. Why can a country have high openness and a closed capital account (China), and what trade-off does this buy?

Answer guide

A strong answer defines trade openness as $(X + M) / GDP$ and financial integration as the freedom of capital movement. China runs massive goods trade while restricting portfolio flows through capital controls and a managed exchange rate. This lets the state capture foreign demand for export-led industrialisation while insulating the economy from the sudden capital flight that devastated East Asia in 1997. The trade-off is forgone allocative efficiency and slower financial-sector development — a price Beijing judged worth paying.

Exercise 4 (Medium). In 200–300 words, explain how a global value chain makes a 21st-century trade-war tariff less effective (and more self-damaging) than a 19th-century tariff on finished goods.

Answer guide

A 19th-century tariff taxed a finished British textile once, at the border. A modern tariff on a smartphone taxes components that cross borders multiple times, so the duty "compounds" through the chain; and retaliation by a partner can cut off a single irreplaceable input (rare-earth magnets, advanced logic chips) that halts domestic assembly. GVCs thus raise the cost of trade wars to the instigator, which partly explains why the 2018–2019 tariff escalation produced more supply-chain disruption and corporate lobbying for exemptions than large-scale reshoring.

Exercise 5 (Medium, comparative). Compare the supply-chain shock of the 2008 financial crisis with that of the 2020 COVID pandemic. In each case, what broke, and what did the response reveal about the resilience of globalised production?

Answer guide

In 2008 the shock was on the demand-and-finance side: trade credit froze, orders collapsed, and container volumes fell roughly 12% in a year; factories idled for lack of financing, not lack of consumer demand. In 2020 the shock was physical: port closures, lockdowns, and just-in-time inventory systems with no slack produced shortages of chips, shipping containers, and medical goods. 2008 revealed financial fragility; 2020 revealed logistical fragility. Both responses (bank bailouts then; fiscal stimulus and "friend-shoring" now) showed that governments will intervene at vast cost when globalised systems fail, undermining the laissez-faire premise of the 1990s order.

Exercise 6 (Hard). Evaluate the integrationist and structural-critique positions on whether globalisation's net effect was positive. In 300–400 words, identify the strongest empirical evidence each can marshal and the single fact most damaging to each.

Answer guide

A strong response will credit the integrationist case with the poverty data: extreme poverty fell from about 36% (1990) to about 10% (2015), mostly in export-led Asian economies; global life expectancy and literacy rose. Its most damaging fact is the concentration of gains — the top 1% captured roughly 27% of income growth 1980–2016 (Milanovic), and Western working-class wages stagnated. The structural-critique case marshals rising within-country inequality, the $r > g$ dynamic ^{[Piketty 2014]}, and the asymmetry of crisis bailouts; its most damaging fact is that the countries that grew fastest (China, Vietnam, South Korea) did so by defying neoliberal prescriptions, using capital controls and industrial policy. The strongest evidence for the managed-globalisation alternative is thus the success of precisely those who ignored the integrationist policy recipe. A sophisticated answer notes that the two camps measure different things and need not be reconciled to a single scalar verdict.

Exercise 7 (Hard, data interpretation). Milanovic's "elephant curve" shows that 1988–2008 income gains were largest for (a) the global middle, mostly in China, and (b) the global top 1%, and smallest for (c) the lower-middle of rich countries. In 250–350 words, explain why this pattern generates political backlash in rich democracies even as it reduces global inequality.

Answer guide

A strong answer will separate between-country inequality (falling, as China converged) from within-country inequality (rising, as the rich-country lower-middle stagnated). The "losers" are concentrated, identifiable, and politically mobilisable in democracies — the deindustrialised "China shock" counties of the US Midwest documented by Autor and colleagues. The "winners" — Asian factory workers and rich-country asset-owners — are diffuse, or politically voiceless across borders. Median-voter politics in rich countries therefore registers the loss even though global welfare rose. This is the structural mechanism linking globalisation's measured success to the populist backlash of 2016 onward, and it anticipates the twenty-first-century tension developed in 32.26.01.

Competing perspectives on globalization Master

This section develops the two positions beyond the comparative sketch and tests them against the crises that defined the era.

Integrationist: the long convergence

The strongest integrationist claim is the "Great Convergence" (Baldwin 2016): for the first time in history, poor countries' GDP per capita grew faster than rich countries' after 1990, reversing five centuries of divergence. The mechanism was the unbundling of production — when GVCs made it possible to locate the labour-intensive stages of manufacturing in low-wage countries without moving the whole firm, the "globalisation trapdoor" opened and hundreds of millions climbed through it ^{[Frieden 2006]}. On this account the WTO, containerisation, and the internet together constitute the most successful anti-poverty technology ever deployed. The integrationist does not deny that American metalworkers lost out — Autor and colleagues' "China shock" papers document roughly 3.4 million US jobs lost 1999–2011 — but insists the aggregate gain dwarfs the loss and that the proper response is domestic redistribution, not protectionism. Protection, the argument runs, taxes consumers and the poor (who spend more of their income on tradable goods) to subsidise a shrinking minority of protected workers.

Structural critique: power, not efficiency

The structural critic reads the same GVC as a governance structure that allocates rents to lead firms. An iPhone may capture roughly $1 o f a sse mb l y v a l u e in C hinaan d$ 300 of design, IP, and retail margin in the United States; trade statistics that book the full factory-gate price to the exporting country overstate the exporter's gain and obscure who profits. Stiglitz's critique of the 1990s order is that capital-account liberalisation was forced on developing countries against their interests and against the evidence, immiserating them in 1997 ^{[Stiglitz 2002]}. Rodrik's "globalization paradox" adds a logical structure: a country can have at most two of {deep integration, national sovereignty, mass democracy} — the 1990s chose integration and thereby neutered democracy, producing the legitimacy deficit that exploded in the 2010s. Dependency and world-systems theorists (Wallerstein, Cardoso) go further, arguing that the core-periphery hierarchy of the colonial era persists in the division of labour: the South supplies raw materials and assembly labour on terms set in the North, reproducing underdevelopment structurally rather than by conspiracy.

The historical economists' resolution

O'Rourke and Williamson's Globalization and History (1999) supplies the long view ^{[O'Rourke-Williamson 1999]}. The first globalisation, 1820–1914, also converged factor prices across the Atlantic and also generated a furious backlash — late-nineteenth-century tariff waves, immigration restriction, and the interwar collapse into autarky that helped produce the Great Depression and the Second World War. The pattern, they argue, is endogenous: integration creates distributional tensions that, if politically unmanaged, destroy the integration that created them. The first globalisation died at Sarajevo and Smoot–Hawley; the question the 2020s pose is whether the second dies at Brexit and the tariff wars, or is merely rebalanced.

Why the backlash came when it did

The timing is the diagnostic clue. If globalisation's benefits were always asymmetric, why did the backlash wait until 2016? Three causes converged. First, the 2008 crisis destroyed the legitimacy of the technocratic elite that managed the order — bailouts for bankers, austerity for workers. Second, the China shock peaked: the offshoring that had boosted corporate profits from 2000 was largely complete by about 2010, leaving devastated communities and no offsetting new industries. Third, the digital revolution polarised labor markets, hollowing the middle-skill jobs that had anchored rich-country democracies. The backlash was not irrational populism; it was a delayed and rational political response to a distributional settlement that the integrationist framework had declared somebody else's problem.

Synthesis. The foundational reason the two schools cannot agree is that they measure different things: integrationists aggregate across people, structural critics disaggregate within them. This is exactly the tension Piketty resolves by separating between-country convergence (China catching up) from within-country divergence (the top one percent pulling away). Putting these together, the central insight is that globalisation's net effect is not a scalar but a distribution, and its political stability depends on whether median voters experience themselves as beneficiaries. The bridge is the 2008 crisis and the COVID supply-chain shock: both revealed that tightly coupled systems optimise for efficiency at the cost of resilience. This generalises the backlash into a structural prediction — appears again in the twenty-first-century unit 32.26.01 — that builds toward an era in which the politics of deglobalisation, not deeper integration, will set the agenda.

Connections Master

Cold War 32.24.01. The post-1991 integration surge was only possible because the Cold War ended. The Soviet dissolution removed the geopolitical partition that had kept two separate trading blocs; the conversion of the ex-socialist economies and China to market (or market-ish) systems added roughly two billion workers to the global labour market within a decade — the supply-side shock from which rich-country wages never fully recovered, and the precondition for every depth measurement in this unit.
Decolonization 32.23.01. The structural-critique position descends directly from the dependency theory that decolonization-era intellectuals (Cardoso, Furtado, Amin) built to explain why formal political independence had not delivered economic convergence. The 1990s order became the empirical test case they had predicted: the GVC reproduced, in corporate form, the core-periphery division of labour that colonialism had imposed by flag.
Neoliberalism and the post-colonial world 32.25.01. The companion unit supplies the institutional architecture — Bretton Woods, the IMF, the Washington Consensus, the WTO — whose depth and consequences this unit measures. Where 32.25.01 explains why the rules were written as they were, this unit measures how deeply they bound national economies and why they generated the backlash.
The twenty-first century 32.26.01. The backlash this unit diagnoses is the entry condition for 32.26.01's analysis of the digital, climatic, and geopolitical power shifts of the 2000s. Trade war, friend-shoring, the US–China rivalry, and the contested future of the WTO all follow from the strain measurements developed here.

Historical & philosophical context Master

Was the second globalisation new?

The deepest historiographical question is whether the post-1991 episode was historically unprecedented or a faster replay of 1820–1914. Kevin O'Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson argued forcefully for continuity: both episodes were driven by a sharp fall in transport and communication costs (steamships and railways then; containers, fibre-optic cable, and packet-switching now), both produced factor-price convergence, and both ended in backlash and war ^{[O'Rourke-Williamson 1999]}. Frieden's Global Capitalism develops the parallel across the long twentieth century, treating the 1914–1945 collapse as the cautionary precedent for the post-2008 era ^{[Frieden 2006]}. The continuity school reads globalisation as a recurring political construction that requires active management to survive.

The discontinuity school (Baldwin, Castells) counters that the information revolution made this globalisation categorically different: when ideas and tasks, not just goods, cross borders instantly, the welfare calculus of classical trade theory no longer applies. On this view the relevant precedent is not 1914 but the printing press — a general-purpose communication technology whose political consequences took centuries to settle.

The philosophy of openness

The deeper philosophical disagreement concerns the proper unit of moral concern. Integrationism inherits the utilitarian tradition that counts welfare impersonally across borders: a Chinese peasant's escape from poverty can, in principle, offset an Ohioan's job loss, because both are weighted equally in the global sum. The structural critique inherits the republican and social-democratic tradition that locates moral and political responsibility in bounded democratic communities: a policy is legitimate only if those who bear its costs can vote on it. Rodrik's trilemma formalises this — deep economic integration requires harmonising standards across jurisdictions that have no shared demos, and is therefore in tension with democratic self-government. This is not an empirical dispute that better data can settle; it is a disagreement about whether "global welfare" is the kind of thing that has moral standing at all.

Bibliography Master

@book{steger2020globalization,
  author    = {Steger, Manfred B.},
  title     = {Globalization: A Very Short Introduction},
  edition   = {4},
  publisher = {Oxford University Press},
  year      = {2020}
}

@book{frieden2006global,
  author    = {Frieden, Jeffry A.},
  title     = {Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century},
  publisher = {W. W. Norton},
  year      = {2006}
}

@book{orourke1999globalization,
  author    = {O'Rourke, Kevin H. and Williamson, Jeffrey G.},
  title     = {Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy},
  publisher = {MIT Press},
  year      = {1999}
}

@book{piketty2014capital,
  author    = {Piketty, Thomas},
  title     = {Capital in the Twenty-First Century},
  publisher = {Belknap Press},
  year      = {2014}
}

@book{stiglitz2002globalization,
  author    = {Stiglitz, Joseph E.},
  title     = {Globalization and Its Discontents},
  publisher = {W. W. Norton},
  year      = {2002}
}

@book{rodrik2011paradox,
  author    = {Rodrik, Dani},
  title     = {The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy},
  publisher = {W. W. Norton},
  year      = {2011}
}

@book{bhagwati2004defense,
  author    = {Bhagwati, Jagdish},
  title     = {In Defense of Globalization},
  publisher = {Oxford University Press},
  year      = {2004}
}

@book{baldwin2016great,
  author    = {Baldwin, Richard},
  title     = {The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization},
  publisher = {Belknap Press},
  year      = {2016}
}

@book{milanovic2016global,
  author    = {Milanovic, Branko},
  title     = {Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization},
  publisher = {Harvard University Press},
  year      = {2016}
}

@article{autor2013china,
  author  = {Autor, David H. and Dorn, David and Hanson, Gordon H.},
  title   = {The {China} Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the {United States}},
  journal = {American Economic Review},
  volume  = {103},
  number  = {6},
  pages   = {2121--2168},
  year    = {2013}
}

Prerequisites

32.24.01
32.25.01

Tier anchors

beginner: Steger, Globalization: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford) — the plain-English framing of a world knitted together and the strains beginning to show
intermediate: Steger, Globalization (Oxford); Frieden, Global Capitalism (Norton) — formal definitions of trade openness, financial integration, and global value chains
master: Frieden, Global Capitalism (Norton); O'Rourke & Williamson, Globalization and History (MIT Press); Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Belknap)

References

Steger, M. B. — Globalization: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 4th ed. 2020) · Chapters on the economic and ideological dimensions of globalization
Frieden, J. A. — Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (Norton, 2006) · Full text; the long twentieth-century frame for integration and backlash
O'Rourke, K. H. & Williamson, J. G. — Globalization and History (MIT Press, 1999) · Full text; the 1820-1914 precedent and factor-price convergence
Piketty, T. — Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Belknap, 2014) · Parts on r > g and within-country versus between-country inequality
Stiglitz, J. E. — Globalization and Its Discontents (Norton, 2002) · Chapters on capital-account liberalization and the 1997 Asian crisis
Rodrik, D. — The Globalization Paradox (Norton, 2011) · The globalization trilemma and the democratic legitimacy deficit
Bhagwati, J. — In Defense of Globalization (Oxford, 2004) · Full text; the liberal-integrationist case
Baldwin, R. — The Great Convergence (Belknap, 2016) · The unbundling of production and the ICT-driven globalization
Milanovic, B. — Global Inequality (Harvard, 2016) · The elephant curve; between- and within-country inequality decomposition
Autor, D., Dorn, D. & Hanson, G. — The China Syndrome (American Economic Review, 2013) · Local labor market effects of the China shock

Estimated time

beginner: 30m
intermediate: 65m
master: 100m