Investments, whether held in trust funds, pensions or by individuals directly, are becoming increasingly global, with financial interests held across different nations and sectors. Recent geopolitical instability and evolving economic approaches to globalisation, including the introduction of US trade tariffs in August, have highlighted the need for investment portfolios to be resilient and adaptable. Crucially, wealth managers and trustees must remain alert to globalisation policies and their implications for investment strategy. But what is “globalisation”? The term can be applied to an almost infinite number of political and financial situations, and its definition can differ depending on who you are speaking to. Kitty Brockbank sat down with Dr Gemma Chenger Deng, co-founder of BRICS+ Thinking, an independent not-for-profit policy platform dedicated to addressing shared global challenges, to discuss globalisation. Dr Chenger Deng founded BRICS+ Thinking alongside Lord O’Neill, a prominent economist best known for coining the term BRIC.
Q: The term ‘globalisation’ is used in many different contexts – what does it encompass, and why should people take notice?
I think globalisation as a term applies to a specific period, when liberal trade and the removal of economic barriers were very popular, particularly in the 2000s and into the 2010s. Today, however, we need to accept that we are in a much more complex situation. We have truly global challenges such as climate change, AI and public health, but also increased defensiveness and resistance to countries entering too deeply into multilateral arrangements that are seen as compromising their sovereignty.
This matters particularly to trustees, business leaders and high net worth individuals because investments, whether held through trusts, pensions or directly, are often global, while governments are becoming more willing to use trade, regulation, taxation, technology and industrial policy to pursue strategic objectives. Decisions made in Washington DC, Beijing or Brussels can therefore have consequences for markets, businesses and investment opportunities far beyond their immediate political context. For trustees and wealth managers, keeping abreast of these developments is increasingly part of understanding risk. For businesses, the same applies to decisions about where to invest, which markets to enter and how resilient supply chains are.
This is a complex situation. On the one hand, AI, for instance, really knows no boundaries at all. On the other, different countries are responding very differently in terms of how they engage with this process and how best to protect themselves. We have also seen a strong and decisive return to more bilateral rather than multilateral behaviour, particularly by the US.
I think this means that we now have a far more multidimensional form of geopolitics – one where, on some issues, global cooperation is inevitable, while on others there is significant divergence in how countries respond. BRICS+ Thinking therefore has to look both at these differences and what they mean, and at the common challenges that, despite our diversity, can only be addressed through collective effort. It is a complicated situation, which is why we need a platform like ours to help interpret it and make sense of where the world is heading.
Q: What, in your opinion, are the successes and challenges of globalisation? How do these challenges present differently across nations?
Globalisation has certainly seen the massive creation of new wealth and development. If you look at India, for instance, its per capita GDP in 1980 was about USD 150. Today it is around ten times that. For China, the impact was even more dramatic. In 1980, China had not registered a single patent in its name. Today, Chinese patents have surpassed 5 million and China leads in global patent filing. The Global South constituted a third of global GDP in 1980. Today it is roughly double that.
Across almost every metric and measurement – from literacy to life expectancy, access to clean water and per capita GDP – the world is a healthier and wealthier place today than it was over four decades ago.
But globalisation has also created inequalities within nations and between them, as well as environmental problems that we are only now beginning to confront fully. Globalisation has been a vast opportunity: it has brought immense benefits, but we can also see now that there needs to be mitigation and calibration. This is particularly important because we are clearly entering another period – that of AI – where the potential benefits are vast, as are the risks.
Q: Why should our readers take notice of global leaders’ approach to globalisation?
Leaders who are frank about both the opportunities and the risks are likely to be the best equipped to deal with the increased complexity of policymaking and geopolitics today. Leaders who offer simple, binary responses might play well to the crowd, but it is very unlikely that they are going to have solutions to the sheer complexity of what we are now facing.
The simple fact is that, with global warming, AI and public health – the really existential issues that all humanity now faces – we have never needed a sensible, evidence-based and proportionate response more. And yet there is plenty of evidence that societies are often divided, and are finding the ways in which they can deal with those divisions increasingly challenging.
A leader who is not frank about the continuing need to work collaboratively with others is not proposing sensible policy or a workable approach.
Q: What country’s approach to globalisation do you think we should all take notice of (for good or bad!), and why?
We have to recognise that, across the world, different models have successfully produced very different outcomes. The US, over the last three decades, has continued to produce high levels of high-quality growth, even up to today. China has constructed more advanced infrastructure than any other country. India has lifted huge numbers of people out of poverty.
In Africa and Latin America, we can see very diverse political and economic models, with both successes and failures. For Europe, too, we have to recognise that, despite recent turbulence, the European Union has created a successful regulatory market, and that it continues to provide the basis for stable political and economic relations across a continent which, up to the Second World War, experienced huge divisions and strife.
No one country has the perfect answer. But part of the mission of our new platform is to look critically and objectively at what different systems and different approaches are achieving, and to see if, despite cultural and other differences, there are ways in which others can learn from and emulate these successes.
Q: Looking forward, what single event or development do you think is most likely to impact global economies and what steps can be taken to mitigate risks and optimise global outcomes?
AI is the biggest one, clearly. It has the greatest potential impact on how we work and on what sort of societies we will have in the future.
If implemented well, it could transform productivity and totally revolutionise sectors like healthcare, law and even administration and government. But it also clearly carries enormous risks – things which are terrifying, like the rise of superintelligence which might control and dominate human systems in ways we will find hard to defend and protect against.
We can already see real fears about how AI will impact labour markets and employment, and whether it will create more inequality. There are also fundamental questions about what privacy means in the age of AI, when we confide so much to LLMs in exchange for convenience.
In education, we are just starting to see the real challenges and problems AI is posing. AI is the most important new development, and one we are keen to help the public understand through our work at BRICS+ Thinking – in particular, by contributing to better global governance of AI.
Q: What drove you to co-found BRICS+ Thinking and what do you hope it will achieve?
Jim O’Neill and I set up BRICS+ Thinking because we wanted to bring about a paradigm shift in policy thinking in the Political West.
Our aim is twofold: first, to give policy thinking a more global perspective by engaging with counterparts in the Global South on truly global issues such as pandemics, AI governance and climate change; and second, to bring more academic excellence and evidence-based knowledge into policy thinking and policymaking circles in a world increasingly captured by competing narratives backed by thin evidence.
We feel that the current geopolitical climate and increasingly security-driven framework are hindering progress on these crucial global challenges. BRICS+ Thinking was therefore established to bring top scholars and policy stakeholders together to co-design, through collaborative policy papers, a form of multilateralism that can ensure we are doing what is necessary to address shared challenges amid the shifting global order.
Ultimately, our aim is to develop actionable policy solutions by bringing together the most capable and informed people in their respective fields.
