新冠肺炎疫情对经济全球化的影响分析

The impacts of COVID-19 pandemic on the development of economic globalization

新冠肺炎疫情是第二次世界大战以来世界面临的最大危机,给世界带来巨大的冲击,包括人们的心理和生活、经济增长与就业、国家治理及世界治理等。这些影响使很多学者、评论家、大众、企业家乃至政府官员产生了非常悲观的情绪,舆论中不乏经济全球化将终结、全球供应链将大规模调整、世界治理格局将彻底改变等言论。本文通过建立"全球化的三角结构"剖析了经济全球化的动力机制,并结合疫情对世界的主要影响,试图揭示后疫情时代经济全球化的走势。我们认为,资本的"空间出路"、技术的"时空压缩"和国家的开放程度是驱动经济全球化的三个基本力量,这三者的变化及其相互作用结果影响着全球化进程。从动力机制看,全球化是一个没有终点且不断变化的历史过程,它不会倒退,而是波动。过去半个世纪以来,世界各国已经被全球化紧密地联系在一起,相互脱钩的代价极其昂贵,没有国家会选择完全脱钩。所谓的逆全球化现象,是全球化发展过程中世界格局变化及各国应对策略调整的结果。新冠肺炎疫情并不能影响全球化的资本和技术驱动力,但是可能影响国家的开放程度。如果疫情持续时间不是很长,经济全球化将很快会回归原有的发展轨迹,继续进行调整。各国也将继续围绕经济全球化进行斗争、妥协、再斗争,直至形成一个相对稳定的状态。因此,经济全球化可能因为应对疫情而踩下急刹车,甚至暂退半步,但很快将继续前行,向着"包容性全球化"的方向发展。

The COVID-19 pandemic is considered the biggest crisis confronted with the world after the Second World War, which has brought huge impacts on people’s health and daily life,economic growth and employment as well as national and international governance. Increasing pessimism is buzzing among scholars, critics, entrepreneurs, the mass and even government officials, and views like the end of economic globalization, large-scale spatial restructuring of global supply chains and fundamental change of the world economic governance structure are becoming prevailing on the media. This paper tries to address the issue of the development trend of economic globalization in the post-pandemic era by developing a framework of globalization’s Triangle Structure to understand its dynamics in addition to a summary of the ongoing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that the spatial fix of capital accumulation,time-space compression led by technological advance and openness of nations are the three major drivers of economic globalization, and the changes and interactions of these three drivers decide the development trend of economic globalization. From such a dynamic viewpoint,economic globalization is an ever-changing integration process without an end but constant fluctuations. The cost of decoupling of nations from globalization would be very huge because they have been highly integrated by global production networks and trade networks and no nation can afford a complete decoupling. The so-called de-globalization phenomena are just short-term adjusting strategies of nations to cope with power reconfigurations brought by economic globalization. The pandemic will have little impacts, or probably nothing, on the spatial fix of capital accumulation and time-space compression led by technological advance,but may temporarily influence some nations’ openness. If the pandemic does not last long,economic globalization will resume from the shock soon after the world goes back to normal,and develop and restructure according to its own dynamics. Thus, we tend to believe the pandemic at most slams the brake of globalization and would not be able to put it into reverse. Economic globalization will not stop or reverse, but develop towards a more inclusive stage.