Understanding the rise of global protectionism

Abstract The past three decades are generally regarded as a period of widespread liberalization and high growth within the world economy. On a wide range of measures, this era has seen the rapid globalization of business and the lifting from poverty of a large number of the world's poorest, particularly within large emerging markets such as China and India. While the undoubted benefits of globalization are widely recognized for raising economic growth rates and engaging a much larger number of nations in international business activity, globalization has always had its critics. The purpose of this article is to explore the recent rise in protectionism—what has been termed “global protectionism”— to examine how it differs from traditional forms of trade protectionism, and to offer some tentative assessment of its determinants. ©2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.