Exile Economics: What Happens If Globalisation Fails

THE MUST-READ GUIDE TO THE TRADE WAR

’A smart, vivid and humane account of the way the world really works’ TIM HARFORD

’This is the book to read if you want to understand what might be about to hit the world economy’ EVAN DAVIS

The dangerous race for self-sufficiency has begun. Be warned.

Nations are turning away from each other. Faith in globalisaton has been fatally undermined by the pandemic, the energy crisis, surging trade frictions and swelling great power rivalry. A new vision is vying to replace what we’ve known for many decades. This vision - Exile Economics - entails a rejection of interdependence, a downgrading of multilateral collaboration and a striving for greater national self-sufficiency. The supporters of this new order argue it will establish genuine security, prosperity and peace. But is this promise achievable? Or a seductive delusion?

Through the stories of globally traded commodities - from silicon to steel and from soybeans to solar panels - economics journalist Ben Chu illustrates the intricate web of interdependence that has come to bind nations together - and underlines the dangers of this new push to isolationism. Exile Economics is an essential guide to this new world in all its promise and peril.

Ben is Policy and Analysis Correspondent at BBC Verify. Previously he was Economics Editor at Newsnight, and at the Independent prior to that. Ben was nominated for Business Journalist of the Year at the 2015 British Journalism Awards and for Business Commentator of the Year at the 2018 Comment Awards. His first book Chinese Whispers: Why Everything You’ve Heard about China is Wrong was nominated for International Affairs Book of the Year at the Paddy Power Political Book Awards in 2014. Ben was born in Manchester to a Chinese father and British mother. He lives in London with his wife and two children