Economics and History of Globalization

Globalization: a phenomenon due to the "invisible hand" of the market or driven by the economic policies of the states and the interests of companies? Towards a richer, freer and more equitable world, or a source of inequalities and social problems? The course deals with the complex reality of globalization considering its causes and effects from a historical-economic perspective, from the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century.

The course is organised in 3 sections on specific topics. Part A will analyze the nineteenth-century globalization, with the expansion of the international circulation of goods, capital, people. Europe and the competition between states had a decisive role in building a new world economy, which seems to organize itself on the center-periphery model. Several factors contributed to the growing integration: industrialization and the transport revolution, international capital investments, mass migration, but also the forced opening of the markets of China and Japan, the construction of the British Empire, the colonization of Africa. In the last decades of the century, the interconnection of economies also leads to the first deep international depression.

Interrupted by the First World War, the globalization of economies resumed in the second post-war period in a new bipolar world order dominated by the US and the USSR. In this context, Part B will compare the planned to the capitalist economies and will deal with the European and Japanese economic miracles, along with those of the so-called "Asian tigers". The lectures will then examine the crucial transition (from the beginning of the Seventies), from the hegemony of Keynesian economic policies to that of neoliberal theories, which promote a new phase of liberalization of economies.

Part C will concentrate on the last decades of the twentieth century, when Latin American countries, China, India, the former Soviet Union, the European Union, modify their economic policies towards an ever greater opening to foreign investments and international trade, promoting the development of multinationals (whose size grows enormously) and the financialization of the economy. The new globalization, strengthened since the 1990s by the internet revolution and the extension of neoliberal policies, brings greater well-being for some social groups, but also an increase in inequalities, instability, international financial crises.