World Trade Hit $34.7 Trillion in 2025. Someone Forgot to Tell the Peak-Globalization Theorists.
The "peak globalization" thesis — that world trade has stopped outpacing GDP growth and the era of hyper-globalization is over — has been declared at least four times since 2008. Each time, trade has rebounded to new highs. The $34.65 trillion in goods and services traded in 2025 is the largest volume in history. The thesis persists because it conflates a noisy ratio with a structural shift, and because it misses a transformation happening on two fronts: what is being traded (services, growing at 8% a year) and who is doing the trading (intra-Asia and South-South flows are growing twice as fast as the global average).
4 oct 20269 min de lectura
