In March of this year, the at-the-time British Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves declared that the old era of globalisation is dead.
Her case was that a series of shocks in recent decades have disrupted things very greatly. The financial crisis of the late 2000s, the pandemic of 2020, the war in Ukraine as well as the Middle East, various energy crises, and repeated supply-chain disruptions.
Others have reached a similar conclusion. David Bach, president of IMD (which is a business school in Switzerland) argues that the US-led economic order has fractured. China has risen, Washington under Donald Trump has enthusiastically embraced tariffs and sanctions (yuge), and governments increasingly are arguing for “resilience” over “efficiency”. Bach calls the previous model of globalisation over.
No doubt. Tariffs are back. Industrial policy is back in vogue. In various countries, immigration restrictions are becoming ever-more popular, and right-wing populist parties like Reform UK, AFD, and National Rally are on quite a considerable upswing. Governments across the West are in many countries attempting to reduce foreign dependence in energy, semiconductors, minerals and technology.
That is smart, by the way. Being dependent on industrial components or raw materials purchased from a geopolitical or ideological foe is pretty risky!
But yet when you actually look more deeply at the numbers, it’s obvious that globalisation is far from over.
People, goods, services and ideas continue crossing borders on a vast and extraordinary scale.
Here are five numbers that I dug up to illustrate this:
That was the value of global trade in goods and commercial services in 2025.
Even more strikingly, it rose by 8% in a single year.
According to the World Trade Organization, goods trade grew 8% and services trade grew 8%. Services reached their highest share of global trade since 2005.
For context, global GDP itself is around 123 trillion. So roughly a quarter of global economic activity is international trade.
That’s huge!
And it seems like a pretty strange obituary for globalisation!
Globalisation increasingly involves things that don’t require a shipping container to send them abroad.
In 2024, exports of digitally-delivered services reached $4.64 trillion, up 8.3% in one year. They accounted for 14.5% of world exports of goods and services.
That category covers everything from finance and professional services to software, remote work and streaming services. The WTO figures are here.
This part of globalisation is especially interesting.
A programmer in Egypt or France or Jamaica can work for a company in Germany. A British architect can sell his services in Hawaii, or China, or Scandinavia. A business in America can buy software development from India.
I personally have done work for companies in places like Australia, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States, so I have very much seen this first hand.
That is how many people lived outside their country of birth in 2024.
In 1990, by contrast, the figure was 154 million.
So during an era of growing political anxiety about migration, the number of international migrants has almost doubled. Of course, large quantities of mass migration probably explain at least a part of the rise of this political anxiety. Undoubtedly, there is a connection. And although I am a liberal and somewhat cosmopolitan in orientation, I don’t deny that migration has been severely mishandled by most Western countries.
But anyway, international migrants now account for roughly 3.7% of humanity, according to the United Nations.
Governments may now be seeking tighter control over migration. (Some would say this is rather like shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted).
But people are still crossing borders in vast numbers.
That was the number of international tourist arrivals recorded during 2025.
This was around 60 million higher than in 2024, according to UN Tourism.
Think about the scale of that.
More than a billion international journeys for tourism in a single year, following a pandemic that temporarily brought global travel close to a standstill!
In my eyes it’s clear: international travel is here to stay.
Nearly 7.3 million university students now study abroad.
In 2000, the figure was 2.1 million.
That’s a wild increase! Studying abroad has become very normalised, and it doesn’t seem to be decreasing even in this era where globalisation is being proclaimed as “dead” left and right.
So perhaps reports of globalisation’s death have arrived a bit prematurely.
Of course, the optimism of the 1990s has faded. Economic integration now comes with far more anxiety about security and resilience.
Realistically, could that optimism have ever lasted?
It’s pretty dubious. Emotions come in cycles—both for individual humans, and for societies.
But I’d say to call globalisation “dead” seems a considerable exaggeration.
All things in balance.
The tremendous optimism of the 1990s was extremely likely to hit the rocks after 9/11 and the global financial crisis.
It’s now up to us to rebuild a more resilient optimism today.
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