NEW US TRADE POLICY: GLOBAL INTERMISSION

Abstract

Considering the latest changes in U.S. trade policy, the author refutes the loss of international competitiveness by the U.S. economy, stressing the country continues to be a major world center for the generation of new knowledge and the development of high-tech (new) economy.
The author emphasizes the globalization causes significant changes in the format of the territorial organization of production owing to the spread of global value chains, while transnational corporations become key economic actors that are guided by global (or macro-regional) rather than purely national criteria. Global criteria often do not coincide with the national ones; thus optimization processes within U.S. TNCs have a direct consequence of sub-optimal national trends in the U.S. economy.
The new U.S. trade policy means the oncoming of a period when globalization is to be decelerated, and national economic regulative instruments needed to eliminate global imbalances and asymmetries are to be relatively strengthened. As a result, it will face serious resistance and active opposition from the global financial capital and related international organisations, political parties and it’s controlled media. However, a return to the policy of far-reaching liberalization of goods, services, capital and labour now appears unrealistic, because it would produce critical political contradictions within the United States. Most likely, there will be a search for a compromise between champions of globalization and transnationalisation, on the one hand, and those supporting a priority revival of production capacity within the U.S., applying for this purpose a set of stimuli and appropriate protective measures.
The author comes to the general conclusion that neoliberal globalization is depleted and, therefore, cannot effectively evolve further on. However, the globalizing process is to revive in future in a significantly modified form, and a search for this new format determines the onset of a sort of “global intermission”