Globalisation: programme overview

See staff involved on this programme.

See discussion papers published under this programme.

See news and press coverage related to this programme.

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The liberalisation of China and India, as well as the fall of the Iron Curtain, has more than doubled the global labour force with access to international markets. At the same time, information and communication technologies have exposed goods and services that were not previously traded to the forces of international competition. While these changes may have boosted productivity and aggregate welfare, they have also increased competition to firm and workers in occupations and tasks that were previously insulated from developments elsewhere in the world. These processes of globalisation and technological change therefore present a mix of challenges and opportunities. Countries as a whole tend to gain from international trade, but groups within those countries can lose, and the identity of these winners and losers changes as new occupations and tasks are opened up to international trade. The asymmetry in the distribution of gains from past liberalisation also shapes the prospects for future policies, as groups form to either support or block attempts to speed up globalisation forces. The process of globalisation also affects complex spatial issues such as the emergence of cities and the clustering of economic activities.

The Globalisation programme attempts to shed light on these and other issues through a series of tightly focused research projects. The programme involves both inter-disciplinary and international collaboration encompassing, in addition to economists, economic geographers and historians. Internationally, the programme has extensive institutional links with other European and North American academics. Recent work carried out by CEP globalisation researchers has been published in numerous prestigious academic journals, including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of International Economics and Review of Economics and Statistics.

The programme concentrates in four main areas of research:

• The Effects of Globalisation on Firms
• The Impacts of Globalisation on Workers
• Trade Policy
• New Economic Geography