The Morung Express, T N Ninan
The world has seen several phases of globalisation, starting with the first migration of homo sapiens from Africa some 70,000 years ago. The last bout of globalisation began in 1870, when there was a burst of trade and human migration; that ended with World War I in 1914. In language that was a foretaste of recent years, people talked at the time of ‘the annihilation of distance’, before the trade and other barriers went up.
The current phase of globalisation acquired momentum in the 1980s. Trade grew twice as fast as global GDP between 1990 and 2005, reaching 30 per cent of the latter. In the same period, the stock of global foreign direct investment grew almost five times as fast as world GDP. Private, cross-border capital flows two years ago reached a stratospheric $929 billion. And people talked once again of the “death of distance”.
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