Trade War, Global Restructuring and Global Production Network: Beating the Odds
| Author | Gouranga G. Das |
| Published date | 01 February 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0015732519886770 |
| Date | 01 February 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Editorial |
Trade War, Global
Restructuring and
Global Production
Network: Beating
the Odds
Introduction
Even five years ago, very few economists would have envisaged that one of the
fastest and forthcoming research issues in international economics would be
quantitative evaluation of policy-induced shocks estimating the changes in eco-
nomic welfare (gains or losses). This is owing to recasting and re-evolution of
economic integration arrangements, as global economy is on the ‘cusp’ of changes.
The genesis of ideas for launching a special issue owes its debt to multiplicity of
factors, such as financial crisis in 2008 and its aftermath, changing political land-
scape after several changes on economic and social fronts, conflicts in domestic
fronts and their repercussions across the border and most importantly the rise of
huge inequality and distribution of gains from globalisation. There is no more
relevant time than this juncture to bring out academic researches on these
burning issues. As expected, the response has been so prompt and overwhelming
that we had more than what we could accommodate in a single volume of an
issue. Thus, this special issue is one volume, and another one will follow suit in
few months’ time.
After weathering the triple crisis—financial, food-fuel and climate change—
the world economy has experienced series of unfolding of events. This has
altered the global trade scenarios due to policy shifts governed by changes in
political, economic and institutional spheres. ‘Great unbundling’—as coined by
Baldwin (2016)—thanks to technological changes and decline in transport cost
since the industrial revolution—has shaped the evolution of trade patterns, struc-
tural changes in the economies especially after the Second World War and the
international relations under different regimes. ICT-enabled fragmentation gave
rise to new forms of industrial competitiveness as flow of know-how combined
north-south flows of resources—goods, ideas and people. Recent episodes of the
rise of protectionism—specially in the United States due to the onslaught of
Trumponomics and the consequential policy shifts, in China and Japan in the
East Asia and in the Western Europe in post-Brexit scenario—has spawned
renewed interests in the role of trade policy for reshaping global trade when post-
World Trade Organization (WTO) world has already dismantled trade barriers to
a very significant level (Salvatore, 2018). The rise of new protectionism—due to
nationalism and/or populism—has led trade policy experts like Paul Krugman,
Dani Rodrik, Joseph Stiglitz and Barry Eichengreen, amongst others to cast
Editorial
Foreign Trade Review
55(1) 7–12, 2020
© 2019 Indian Institute of
Foreign Trade
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DOI: 10.1177/0015732519886770
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