By Jerry Haar and Altug Ulkumen
Veni, vidi, vici. (“I came, I saw, I conquered”) Julius Caesar, 26 BC. Donald Trump, 2017. However, the new U.S. president confronts a landscape far more daunting and turbulent than the Roman emperor and his legions faced two millennia ago–namely one which is supplanting a decades-old, idealism-based global governance that originally arose from the ashes of the Second World War.
The world order that emerged after 1945 was one of even greater opportunities, as ideological barriers came crashing down a quarter of a century ago, unlocking vast labor pools that received their first taste of the free markets.
We have often heated discussions on trade policy shifts. To make reasonable arguments, we must consider that the fundamental composition of trade has been changing. For example, from the 1960s to 1990s, the trade role of primary commodities has declined precipitously while in parallel, the importance of manufactured goods has increased. This has meant that those countries and workers who had specialized in commodities such as rubber or mining typically fell behind those that had embarked on strengthening their manufacturing sector. With sharply declining world market prices for commodities and rising prices for manufactured goods, commodity producers were increasingly unable to keep pace. Some commodity-dependent countries realized temporary windfalls as prices of oil, wheat, and corn rose dramatically, only to watch them evaporate as prices dropped in 2009.