Globalization and Economic Integration

Dear Colleagues,

Globalization and integration processes have undergone profound evolution and transformation in recent decades. The emergence of new global players both at regional (East Asia) and country levels (BRICS) and at microeconomic levels (emerging multinationals, value chains), together with social, economic, health and geopolitical events, seem to lead towards a multipolar world economy. Western capitalist countries and emerging countries of the East and the South seem determined to take different paths, following divergent national interests. Well-established integration processes, such as the European Union (EU), struggle to manage the heterogeneity of its member countries and reconcile national interests with Community objectives. More recent integration processes, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and the BRICS, together with their multilateral institutions are apparently strengthening the role of the East and the South in the international economy and politics, apparently in alternative to the West-dominated globalization and integration and their institutions.

Do these processes represent attempts at making globalization work better and more effectively involve different areas of the world? Or do they and the new attempts at area integration represent important steps in the ongoing dispute for the dominance over the world economy? Or do they represent the building blocks of the new multipolar international order? Do these forces and processes move forward a new organization and governance of globalization and integration or do they lead to disrupting globalization and making disintegration prevail? What will the gains and the losses be? What is the role of demography, innovation, technology, skills and education, inequalities and mobility in these new scenarios? How will labour markets, financial markets and international trade evolve? How will the role of international institutions change?

The purpose of this Special Issue is to answer these and possibly other questions, and to investigate the nature of globalization after years of exogenous and endogenous shocks and conflicts. This Special Issue also aims at analysing the evolving features of globalization and integration and the differences with respect to end-of-20th-century globalization, their coevolution with integration processes (both microeconomic and macroeconomic integration, including value chains and financial integration and inter-country trade integration), and reactions to recent challenges.

Prof. Dr. Bruno Dallago
Dr. Sara Casagrande
Guest Editors

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• globalization
• world economy
• institutional variety
• finance
• integration processes
• disintegration
• multipolar economy
• capitalism
• labour
• east
• west
• international trade
• value chains