**3. Obstacles to globalization, from drop in the growth to political ones**

### **3.1 Drops in the growth due to financial crises or emerging conflicts**

After the protracted upward development of globalization described in Section 1, world trade fell sharply in 2009 (**Table 8**).

Figures represented in **Table 8** clearly show the drop in both growth and hopes caused by the bankrupt of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The global financial crisis of 2008 was followed by an extremely fluctuating and sometimes stagnant trend in international trade (**Figure 2**).

In these sudden (or gradually postponed) storms, both businessmen and politicians ask themselves *what's around the corner*, while the latter ones—in short or mid-terms, also due to different visions of the world (*Veltanschauung*), competences, and vested interests—succeed in finding some solutions in near every case, normally damaging State budget by the increase of expenses to be "solved" by increasing debt or printing currency (or both).

The problem referred here is a well-known one, whose most important consequences are connected to i) the spatial extension and ii) the time span of the crisis.

While the latter can be traced back to the abovementioned political "solution," the former one is strictly connected to such factors as follows:


Factors 1–3 are self-explaining ones, and in a sense the fourth too, about which we limit here to recall i) the dramatic effects of *Black Friday* on the world economy, ii) the large but not-so-dramatic effects of Freddie Mac & Co. in 2009, and iii) the effects of crises in some Latin America countries, repeated ones but regularly absorbed up to now.


*Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/264682/worldwide-export-volume-in-the-trade-since-1950/ (accessed 6 May 2022).*

**Table 8.**

*Global export value of trade in goods 2008–2009 (billion dollars).*

#### **Figure 2.**

*Global export value of trade in goods 2010–2020 (billion dollars). Source: Authors' elaboration based on data from https://www.statista.com/statistics/264682/worldwide-export-volume-in-the-trade-since-1950/ (accessed 6 may 2022).*

Two more notations seem anyway of some interest here:


Financial crises are anyway not alone in causing (heavy) disturbances to world economy, and globalization in particular. One more category storms includes all the more or less important mismatches occurring along years in different continents, *sudden overturning of regimes*, *revolutions*, *famines*, *vars*.

### *Our Globalization Era among Success, Obstacles and Doubts DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.105545*

To recall here only the most dramatic of them, we could rapidly mention the French Revolution (1789), the crumbling down of the Chinese Empire (1911), the Soviet Revolution in Russia (1917), the pulling out of the Shah in Imperial Persia (1979), not to mentions the so many local military rebellions in Africa, South America, and elsewhere.

Mention apart is deserved, to better clear our topic, by the World War I, originated by apparently silly causes (the assassination of an Austrian Archiduke), but as a matter of fact signing the dramatic end of the unbelievable more than 40 years of expansion and growth of the Western World which on due course since the Franco-German War of 1871.

Treating these two kinds of problems, scholars turn by turn qualify these disturbances as *unexpected*/ *unimaginable*/*unpredictable* and so on. In parallel, they resume the old double couple of environmental "challenges and threats" for firms must strategically answer coping with their own "strengths and weaknesses." Be it of this kind, or even a more sophisticated one by the help of econometric models, this interpretation can be radically criticized on the bases of the systematic approach to the problem, suggested by a seminal contribution of 1933 by Ragnar Frisch (Nobel Prize in Economics 1969) [42].

This approach, which gave origin to a set a studies in particular in non-Anglo-Saxon world [43, 44]4 , distinguishes two basic kinds of forces operating within economic dynamics, moving it currently or by exception, in regular v. erratica a way.

So, squeezing some thousands of pages in a few lines, we could describe Frisch interpretation as such the following:


Obvious to mention among most important impulse variables as the last 100 years are concerned, the World War I and II, the Sino-Japanese war of 1931 ff., the Italian war against Ethiopia 1934–1935 and—after some 20 years of peace 1944 (Bretton Woods) to Vietnam war (1964 ff.)—the set on international wars and disturbances, in addition to abovementioned ones, also the two *oil crisis* (1973 and 1980), the crumbling away of the Berlin Wall, and the disintegration of U.R.S.S. (1991) to give space at the end to the series of further wars in Iraki, Serbia, Lybia, and elsewhere.

Generally speaking, the political, sociocultural, economic, and industrial consequences of those impulse variables are well known ones to the reader, with general overturning—in worst cases—of boundaries, population distribution, public finance, industrial equilibria, but, at the same time, a fast development of technology, and so many advantages for the winner, if any. One more feature anyway to be mentioned physical and financial destructions apart—is the common and general increase of

<sup>4</sup> See in particular Demaria, *cit*., *I propagatori*, 51–751, *Entelechiani e antientelechiani* (*Impulse variables*), 755–1279.

prices, industrial, and consumer ones, which change the equlibria of families, firms, and in case the State in some cases in a dramatic way.

Propagation variables, each of them normally working with better or worse an equilibrium, are on their turn differently shocked by the aforementioned impulses, anyway under an immediate disorder under the pressure of the impulse ones. We conclude this flash leaving on one side the analysis of the consequences once more to the reader, and on the other listing the most important propagation variables:

A. natural propagation forces:

	- institutions,
	- international relations,
	- money, banking, and finance;
	- type and size of firms,
	- competition structures,
	- distribution of income and wealth (according to Pareto theories) [43].
