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In the Balance: Globalisation Backlash?

Globalisation Backlash?

08/10/2016 GMT

BBC World Service - In the Balance, Globalisation Backlash?

Is globalisation now in retreat? Should it or can it be abandoned?

The impact of globalisation has been very much in the spotlight with the wave of populist rhetoric of late. We heard it in Britain with the Brexit referendum to leave the EU, and now with the arguments of US presidential candidate, Donald Trump, who thinks recent trade deals with China, Latin America and beyond have short-changed American workers. Until the global financial crisis of 2009, free trade seemed like an ambition everyone believed in. Today - not so much. Currency manipulation, tariffs and state support - they all mean that one person's free trade is another person's rip off.  Is globalisation now in retreat? Should it and can it, be abandoned? And what is globalisation anyway? 

The BBC's Ed Butler is joined by Professor Jeffrey Sachs, US economist and UN adviser based at Columbia University, Michael Stumo, Head of the Coalition for a Prosperous America, which opposes many of his country's recent trade deals, and Professor Pankaj Ghemawat, from the New York University Stern School of Business and IESE Business School in Barcelona.

(Photo: Demonstrators pull a Trojan horse as they protest against the transatlantic trade deals CETA and TTIP in Vienna, 2016. Credit: Georg Hochmuth/AFP)

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