Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of boxes
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Europe's laissez-faire system and its impact before World War I
- 2 Decline of laissez-faire and the rise of the regulated market system
- 3 Economic dirigisme in authoritarian–fascist regimes
- 4 The centrally planned economic system
- 5 Mixed economy and welfare state in an integrated post-World War II Western Europe
- 6 Globalization: return to laissez-faire?
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Globalization: return to laissez-faire?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of boxes
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Europe's laissez-faire system and its impact before World War I
- 2 Decline of laissez-faire and the rise of the regulated market system
- 3 Economic dirigisme in authoritarian–fascist regimes
- 4 The centrally planned economic system
- 5 Mixed economy and welfare state in an integrated post-World War II Western Europe
- 6 Globalization: return to laissez-faire?
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Globalization and its characteristics
During the last quarter of the twentieth century, a new trend figured in the world economy: globalization. Europe became one of the main participants in this transfiguration. Several historians maintain that there is nothing new in globalization – consider an ancient form of globalization, the Christian Church (Hopkins, 2002). According to others, early modern times, and even more so the nineteenth century, marked the beginnings of globalization. In this view, globalization was successively advanced by the colonial empires, the railroads, the laissez-faire system, and the international gold standard. From late medieval times long-distance trade and cashless payment networks began internationalizing the European economy. Worldwide trade networks emerged during the early modern centuries. All these, however, were only the beginning of a long historical trend that led to globalization.
[T]he really big leap to more globally integrated commodity and factor markets took place in the second half of the nineteenth century. By 1914, there was hardly a village or town anywhere on the globe whose prices were not influenced by distant foreign markets, whose infrastructures were not financed by foreign capital, whose engineering … and even business skills were not imported from abroad, or whose labor markets were not influenced by [emigration or immigration] … [However, because of a strong backlash] the world economy had lost all of its globalization achievements in three decades, between 1914 and 1945. In the half century since then, it has won them back …
(O'Rourke and Williamson: 1999, 2)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- An Economic History of Twentieth-Century EuropeEconomic Regimes from Laissez-Faire to Globalization, pp. 263 - 326Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006