Economics and History of Globalization

Globalisation: what past and what future? 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, social and ecological problems? The course deals with the complex reality of globalisation, considering its causes and effects from a historical-economic perspective, from the 19th century to the beginning of the 21st century.
The course is organised in three sections on specific topics. Part A will analyse nineteenth-century globalisation, 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 organise itself on the centre-periphery model. Several factors contributed to the growing integration: industrialisation 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 colonisation 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 globalisation 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 economies (USSR and China) to the capitalist ones and will deal with the economic development of the USA, 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 the rise of neoliberal theories, which promote a new phase of liberalisation of economies.
Part C will focus on the last decades of the 20th 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 financialisation of the economy. The new globalisation, 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. Finally, the emergence of China as an economic giant at the start of the new millennium will be treated in relation to the new multipolar world order, in which the competition between states is not at all abated and a new 'race' for the world's natural resources has been accentuated. Since some years there has been increasing talk on the 'decline of globalization', while a contraction and restructuring of the process of international economic interdependence is looming after the pandemic and the ongoing military conflicts. Already some observers speak of the need for a 'selective re-globalization', which decreases Europe's dependence on energy, military and fundamental goods, promoting its greater autonomy and an internal social cohesion policy that goes beyond the neoliberal policies followed so far.