• Geographical Research
  • Vol. 39, Issue 7, 1439 (2020)
Weidong LIU*
DOI: 10.11821/dlyj020200514 Cite this Article
Weidong LIU. The impacts of COVID-19 pandemic on the development of economic globalization[J]. Geographical Research, 2020, 39(7): 1439 Copy Citation Text show less

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic is considered the biggest crisis confronted with the world after the Second World War, which has brought huge impacts on people’s health and daily life, economic growth and employment as well as national and international governance. Increasing pessimism is buzzing among scholars, critics, entrepreneurs, the mass and even government officials, and views like the end of economic globalization, large-scale spatial restructuring of global supply chains and fundamental change of the world economic governance structure are becoming prevailing on the media. This paper tries to address the issue of the development trend of economic globalization in the post-pandemic era by developing a framework of globalization’s Triangle Structure to understand its dynamics in addition to a summary of the on-going impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that the spatial fix of capital accumulation, time-space compression led by technological advance and openness of nations are the three major drivers of economic globalization, and the changes and interactions of these three drivers decide the development trend of economic globalization. From such a dynamic viewpoint, economic globalization is an ever-changing integration process without an end but constant fluctuations. The cost of decoupling of nations from globalization would be very huge because they have been highly integrated by global production networks and trade networks and no nation can afford a complete decoupling. The so-called de-globalization phenomena are just short-term adjusting strategies of nations to cope with power reconfigurations brought by economic globalization. The pandemic will have little impacts, or probably nothing, on the spatial fix of capital accumulation and time-space compression led by technological advance, but may temporarily influence some nations' openness. If the pandemic does not last long, economic globalization will resume from the shock soon after the world goes back to normal, and develop and restructure according to its own dynamics. Thus, we tend to believe the pandemic at most slams the brake of globalization and would not be able to put it into reverse. Economic globalization will not stop or reverse, but develop towards a more inclusive stage.
Weidong LIU. The impacts of COVID-19 pandemic on the development of economic globalization[J]. Geographical Research, 2020, 39(7): 1439
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