Abstract

The process of lowering and removing barriers to the flow of ideas, people, capital, goods, and services at the global level has been presented by many liberal thinkers as a way of opening economies and societies. Neoclassical economists argue that markets, for instance, are potentially boundless: the less external constraints and restrictions, the more smoothly and efficiently they function. Trends toward increasing the intensity of exchanges at the supra-national level, conventionally called globalization, have had nonlinear dynamics. It has taken several decades to regain the same ratio of exports to the world GDP as on the eve of World War..