Dialoguepk

11 July 2020 Author: Razeen Sally, NUS The COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating changes underway since the global financial crisis (GFC) in 2008. It is ushering in a new era of deglobalisation and protectionism — a new mercantilist world order. Three global shifts will likely shape international trade beyond the immediate crisis and into the ‘post-vaccine’ future. The first is an accelerated shift from market to state: more government interventions will further restrict markets. The second is to national unilateralism — governments acting on their own, often against each other — at the expense of global cooperation. The third is to more contested and unstable geopolitics, centred on US–China rivalry. Together, they herald a new mercantilism, whose worst modern precedent is the interwar period in the first half of the 20th century. Mercantilism is the exercise of state power to control markets domestically and internationally. Malign mercantilism governed the decades preceding