Hello everyone and welcome to ESAIP's Global Economy podcast. My name is Frederick Erickson.

And today I am joined by my colleague, Eric van der Maril. Eric is the chief economist at ESAIP and besides that he's

also a professor at the ULP in Brussels and work a lot together with the World Bank as well.

Eric has for many many years now done really pioneering work on issues like trade in services, trade

in digital services and the digital economy more broadly thinking and researching what type

of changes that we are seeing in the global economy and of course in globalization. And this is also really the conversation I would like to have with Eric today.

I should also say that Eric is actually writing on a book on globalization

and what changes that we've seen in globalization

and what they mean for our future.

And I think if I'm lucky, I may be able to tease some stuff out of him about what that

book is going to include. So, Eric, welcome to the podcast again. Hello, Fredik. So what I would

like to start with is if we just sort of take the temperature on the broad political economy debate right now,

there has been a lot of things that have been written over the past couple of years,

suggesting that globalization is dead, that we are now in a very new type of era,

where the global economy just not is, is not going to become

more integrated in the same way as we've seen over the past five, six, perhaps even seven

decades with a gradual increase in how we are as economies and as individuals, perhaps,

getting closer to people in our work

or in our private lives with people that live on another side of the planet.

Now, with a war in Ukraine and with lots of geopolitical discussions around,

I think that sentiment, that globalization is dead, has

increased a lot. And I think there is an expectation out there, which is that five years from now,

...