Even globalisation's defenders admit that the process can be a cruel one, and many global institutions are distinctly accident-prone.

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These costs will mount even as globalisation succeeds in its own terms, at a time when government's capacity to respond is draining away.

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When in fact the very assumptions in the models which lead to our concluding that there is a problem that needs a solution are that markets, globalisation and yes, even capitalism, are part of the solution not the problem.

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Even if there were no policies to undermine it, globalisation is suffering its biggest reversal in the modern era.

ECONOMIST: The world economy

The losers from globalisation triggered a political backlash against it, even before the first world war sealed its fate.

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Mr James's main theme is that globalisation cannot be taken for granted: it may slow down, or even retreat, as it did with such calamitous results in the 1930s.

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Even if American capitalism is the best way to get rich, nothing in the logic of globalisation forces other countries to adopt the American way if they would rather be different and accept the cost.

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The world has changed drastically, but some South-East Asian governments have not adapted: to the globalisation of the marketplace, to the social changes their own economic triumphs have wrought, or even to the transformation of the world since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

ECONOMIST: And now the political fall-out

Occasionally the threat lay in that buzzword of today, globalisation, and its concomitant demand for greater scale: Chrysler merged with Daimler-Benz because, even as number three in the world's largest car market, it was too small to prosper alone.

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