The most important contemporary historical event linked to the fluctuations of current international trade is the accelerated growth of globalization. The theorists of globalization have not established a precise starting date for this process, however, I believe that, from the year 1945, at the end of the Second World War, the establishment of conditions and rules in transactions between countries began. encourage the exchange of goods, financial assets, information, data, knowledge, etc; between the nations.
Evidently, globalization will be the event that will begin to subordinate the functioning of communities around the world, therefore, any fact that alters the progress of this process will have major consequences on the functioning of the various national economies.
In such a way that, the increase in the importance of globalization in the lives of citizens has diminished the influence of world leaders on the daily lives of the governed. It is expected then that many governors and established powers oppose an event that is born of society itself.
Go to: Globalization, Power, and Security - SEAN KAY* - Ohio Wesleyan University
During the year 1945, in the midst of the generalized horror caused by the world wars, two lines of academic thought emerge that dictate how to guide the economic activity of nations from that moment.
On the one hand, Development Theories appear, which cover various fields of study of the economy, but also argue that, to avoid future world wars, it is necessary that:
- all nations achieve a high degree of economic development and, therefore, a high standard of living for their citizens.
- prevent the ex-colonies from being forced by other nations to return to a new colonialism.
The Theories of Development highlight as absolutely necessary the absence of high tariffs in the context of trade relations between nations so that all nations can achieve their development goals.
On the other hand, Macroeconomics emerges, an approach that highlights the value of internal economic activity as a means to achieve the economic objectives of a society, but which, at the same time, grants a secondary role to external economic activity, that is, to that linked to the international commercial and financial movement.
Macroeconomics reaches a notorious prestige because it allows the rulers to successfully counteract the cyclical crises of capitalism. This theoretical apparatus becomes extremely useful in industrial economies but completely useless in the context of non-industrial economies.
Starting in the 1970s, analysts highlighted the growing role of international economic activity, which is a matrix of opinion that has been gaining strength since then. Thus, at some point in the 1990s Megaeconomics was born, but without yet having any relevant theoretical construction. The most important successes achieved by the mega-economy, up to now, consist in the increasing emission of global data and statistics, such as those published by the World Bank, such as: global GDP.
Since 1945, the United States has emerged as the nation with the greatest economic, political and military power of the group conformed by the capitalist countries and opposes the USSR, which leads the group of countries with a socialist orientation; initiating in this way what is known as "cold war".
As we see, globalization begins within the group of countries belonging to the capitalist front due to the increasing increase in the volume of trade between them. Trade between capitalist and socialist countries was extremely low and, even among socialist countries, international trade was practically nonexistent; they only highlight some economic aid granted by the USSR to some of its satellites.
Within this process of globalization, the dollar reaches to be the preferred currency of international use for transactions of various types; This occurs due to the facilities that the use of the currency of the country with the greatest volume of commercial and financial activity abroad gives to the normal development of the world economic activity. The leadership of the dollar is a phenomenon that will undoubtedly condition the functioning of exports, imports and capital flows throughout the world.
On the other hand, starting in 1945, the purchasing power of the Americans with respect to their peers from the rest of the world increases radically accelerated, perhaps exponentially, resulting in the incentives to acquire goods produced in the rest of the world. world are growing. Of course, this is the result of belonging to the nation with the highest GDP in the world and that also has a positive, constant and continuous annual economic growth rate. Definitely, the accelerated growth of the purchasing power of the Americans with respect to goods from the rest of the world, is a phenomenon that conditions the behavior of international trade and the flow of financial assets on the planet.
Evidently, the two phenomena recently mentioned determine the fundamental characteristic of today's international trade: it is oriented to sell products in the United States.
Obviously, the global productive activity and global trade are not intended to meet the consumption needs of buyers around the globe, no, the global productive activity and global trade have as their primary purpose to satisfy the needs of the American consumer. This is how the demand for consumption of international goods required by the rest of the nations is only residual.
This is how, approximately, from the end of the 1970s, Asians; conscious of the increasing size of the purchasing power of the North Americans, they are dedicated to producing goods of high added value and low cost with the purpose of exporting them, fundamentally, to the United States; indeed, the growth strategies of the Asian economies are based on the goal of selling manufactured products in the USA.
Knowing the current international trade situation and having some idea of how, through history, it reached this point; We could make some projections of what the future of international trade would be from the moment in which the set of events known as commercial war begins.
At this time, no one can establish, precisely, what will be the consequences of the onset of commercial war on international trade. However, we are able to suspect which are the fundamental lines within which the results of this process of increasing tariffs must be located.
These will be the following:
- establishment of a new international economic order,
- return to the colony system
- the coexistence of protectionism and free trade.
For many these three scenarios are unlikely and they bet on a disappearance of the commercial war.
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