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Foreword

International trade, migration and globalised finance are the ingredients of a cocktail named globalisation, the recipe of which we haven’t yet mastered and the taste of which we may, if we’re not careful, find bitter. Furthermore, these three ingredients are very unevenly dosed. Most countries want to strictly control international migration. They’re mak- ing timid efforts to organise international trade (booming since contai- nerisation) in major negotiations, while finance – globalisation’s most successful component – is still regulated very weakly. It’s an explosive mixture. Governments face widely-varying obsta- cles depending on migrants’ qualifications and country of origin, against the backdrop of a social question that’s becoming global. Trade growth creating both winners and, lest it be forgotten, losers is a source of tension. The economy’s excessive “financialisation” has emerged as the ideal culprit for a crisis whose extent we’re only now starting to measure, and runs the risk of distracting attention from a whole set of imbalances that have been growing over the past 20 years. The danger lies in making globalisation responsible for most rich countries’ economic ills – offshoring, de-industrialisation, unem- ployment, rising income inequality, impoverished remote regions, and standardised lifestyles – and deluding us into believing that if we can reverse the phenomenon, we will solve all these problems. The truth is that no simple solution such as “deglobalisation” can respond to such complex phenomena. This book’s great merit is that it summarises currently available analyses and provides bench- marks against which we can evaluate the effectiveness of our judg- ments and policies in overcoming the growing fragility of individuals, companies, sectors, countries, and sometimes even entire regions. To support these benchmarks, the book provides an extensive his- torical overview that shows how empires and trade grew side by side. Where previously we had a centre and a periphery, today we are witnessing the emergence of a multi-centric world economy and the increasingly pronounced convergence of emerging countries, led by China, India and Brazil.

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While this convergence is specific to globalisation (on the upswing in the past 30 years), it also applies to life expectancy, fer- tility and – quite spectacularly – education. Between the early 1960s and 2010, the literacy rate of the world population increased from under 60% to 82%. This crucial aspect of “immate- rial” globalisation is the combined result of generalised schooling, widespread communication networks and the proliferation of media for exchanging information. Our view of globalisation is very much influenced by the angle from which we approach it. I would like to emphasise three of the issues covered in this book. First, we must be very careful with the numbers we use to measure globalisation. Statistics are misleading. Trade is conducted by companies, not countries. Some of what fea- tures in international flows is only intra-firm trade stemming from a globally dispersed value chain, and some of what features in domes- tic flows stems from the activities of subsidiaries belonging to for- eign groups that have decided to shift from exporting to producing in the local market. Yet while this features in companies’ interna- tional activities, it mostly does not appear in international flows. Further, in the interests of objectivity, we need to retain a certain perspective on the extent of global economic integration. As Matthieu Crozet and Lionel Fontagné reminded us in Économie et statistiques (Economy and Statistics), published by the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) in 2010: “In developed and emerging countries alike, the share of companies directly engaged in an international relationship is very much the minority, and rarely exceeds 20%. Moreover, most exporters have an extremely limited presence in global markets and are active only in a small number of neighbouring markets.” Finally, while most globalisation studies cover the legal economy, what do we know of the extent of the “dark side” of globalisation – the black market economy, offshore centres, etc.? As Alain Bauer and Xavier Raufer wrote in La face noire de la mondialisation (The Dark Side of Globalisation), published by the Centre national de la recher- che scientifique (CNRS) in 2009, we must examine “how this criminal globalisation undermines economies, finances, and countries” if we are to implement effective policies to combat practices and organisa- tions that undermine democracies and equitable economies.

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It is up to each of us to observe and gauge, curiously and cautiously, the magnitude of the complex phenomenon of globalisation.

Pascal Le Merrer

Economist, professor at the École normale supérieure de Lyon, author of Économie de la mondialisation: opportunités et fractures (The Economics of Globalisation: Opportunities and Fractures) (de Boeck, Brussels, 2007)

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