Economics and History of Globalization

The course will commence on Monday, 16th September 2024, at 14.30 (via Noto, room K33) and will continue on Tuesday and Wednesday at 14.30, room K12 via Noto).

COURSE: Economic globalisation in history

Globalisation: what past and what future? A phenomenon due to the "invisible hand" of the market or driven by the economic policies of states and the interests of companies? Towards a richer, freer and fairer world, or a source of inequalities, social and environmental problems? The course deals with the complex reality of globalisation, looking at its causes and effects from a historical-economic perspective, from the 19th century to the beginning of the 21st century.

The course is divided into three thematic sections. Part A analyses the globalisation of the nineteenth century, with the expansion of the international circulation of goods, capital and people. Europe and inter-state competition played a decisive role in the construction of a new world economy, which seems to be organised on a centre-periphery model. Several factors contributed to this growing integration: industrialisation and the transport revolution, international capital investment, mass migration, but also the forced opening of the markets of China and Japan, the construction of the British Empire, the colonisation of Africa, the economic transformation of the United States and Latin America. In the last decades of the century, the interdependence of economies also led 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) with the capitalist ones, and will deal with the economic development of the USA, the European and Japanese economic miracles, as well as those of the so-called "Asian Tigers". The lectures will then examine the crucial transition (from the early 1970s) from the hegemony of Keynesian economic policies to the rise of neo-liberal theories promoting a new phase of economic liberalisation.

Part C focuses on the last decades of the twentieth century, when the countries of Latin America, China, India, the former Soviet Union and the European Union changed their economic policies to open up more and more to foreign investment and international trade, encouraging the development of multinationals (whose size increased enormously) and the financialisation of the economy. The new globalisation, reinforced since the 1990s by the Internet revolution and the extension of neo-liberal policies, has brought greater prosperity for some social groups, but also increased inequalities, instability and international financial crises, as well as systemic fragility due to the global networks and chains necessary for the production and transport of many essential goods. Finally, the emergence of China as an economic giant at the beginning of the new millennium is discussed in the context of the new multipolar world order, in which competition between states has not diminished and a new "race" for the world's natural resources has intensified. IFor some years now, a process of contraction and restructuring of international economic interdependence has been underway, accelerated by the pandemic and military confrontations. This is a complex change of course that is leading back to a regionalisation of the world economy.