Economic Globalization - Irreversibility

Irreversibility

According to China's prominent economist Gao Shanguan, economic globalization is an irreversible trend due to the fact that the world markets are in great need of science and information technologies. With the growing demands of science and technology, Shanquan states that with world markets take on an "increasing cross-border division of labor" that works its way down to every facet of globalized markets from both developed and developing nations.

Nevertheless, Princeton University professor Robert Gilpin argues that though economic globalization seems to be irreversible, nations' various economic policies have suppressed the impetus for their own economies to move forward, which he states has been shown in the past, thus debunking Shanquan's theory of economic globalization as a primarily irreversible phenomena. Further, in his recent book entitled Globalization: Power, Authority, and Legitimacy in Late Modernity, Antonio L. Rappa agrees with Gilpin's argument of economic globalization as being reversible and references International Studies professor Peter J. Katzenstein accessing that due to the symbiotic nature of globalization and regionalism, so does the conflict between economic regionalism and multiculturalism.