Almost 15 years ago, in The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman popularized
the latest wave of globalization as a world of giant corporate supply
chains that tripled world trade between 1990 and 2010. Major
corporations such as Apple, Dell, and GE offshored manufacturing to
low-cost economies; China became the world's factory, mass-producing and
exporting computers and gadgets to Western shoppers. This paradigm of
globalization has dominated global trade policy-making and guided
hundreds of billions of dollars in business investments and development
spending for almost three decades.
But we are now on the cusp of a new era. Revolutionizing World Trade
argues that technologies such as ecommerce, 3D printing, 5G, the Cloud,
blockchain, and artificial intelligence are revolutionizing the
economics of trade and global production, empowering businesses of all
sizes to make, move, and market products and services worldwide and with
greater ease than ever before. The twin forces of digitization and trade
are changing the patterns, players, politics, and possibilities of world
trade, and can reinvigorate global productivity growth. However, new
policy challenges and old regulatory frameworks are stifling the promise
of this most dynamic, prosperous, and inclusive wave of globalization
yet. This book uses new empirical evidence and policy experiences to
examine the clash between emerging possibilities in world trade and
outdated policies and institutions, offering several policy
recommendations for navigating these obstacles to catalyze growth and
development around the world.
