Dani Rodrick. Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 336pp. Reviewed by Bilal Hafeez.
The Post-Globalisation Economic Model
Harvard economist Dani Rodrik was one of the earliest sceptics of globalisation. He’s best known for coining his ‘trilemma’ for the world economy, which he stated as:
‘…democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration are mutually incompatible: we can combine any two of the three, but never have all three simultaneously and in full’.
His key insight was that a pursuit of hyper-globalisation – that is, selecting policies that favour the integration of economies – would lead to an erosion of either democracy (politics moves to a federal level, as in the EU), or the nation state (wherein domestic interests are subordinated). In identifying this ‘trilemma’, he was arguably prescient of the current populist backlash against globalisation.
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