This course promotes a “grand strategy” approach to how climate change and demographic trends – along with the ascendancy of a global majority middle class – transform our global economy from its historic East-West paradigm to one dominated by North-South dynamics. This is a crucial perspectives for anyone involved in international trade and the globalization of markets.

The world economy is undergoing three structural changes, each of which are enough – on their own – to define a new era of globalization . The first is climate change, which decimates lower latitudes (developing countries), denying them the benefits of globalization, while paradoxically empowering higher latitude global markets. The second is demographic aging unfolding at great rapidity across America, Europe, and Asia (Japan in particular). The third is the ascendancy of a majority global middle class whose huge resource requirements, per economists of all stripes, will drive future global economic growth – if this South-centric mass of humanity can successfully navigate climate change’s devastating impact.

Put them together and the world trade is facing an unprecedented tilting of its geopolitical axis from one historically oriented East-West to one dominated by North-South dynamics (e.g., mass northward migrations by climate refugees [see the US-Mexico border today]). The world’s 21st-century superpowers (United States, European Union, Russia, China, India) will thus compete in helping smaller powers survive and navigate these world-restructuring dynamics, in effect entering into a superpower “brand war” to win (first) economic and (then) political allegiance from among these more vulnerable nation-states.

In this new form of competition – one that will unfold as much in the cyber realm as the real world, superpowers will seek to address the majority global middle class’s quest for stability, prosperity, and security. Having achieved consumer status for the first time, these billions, largely centered in the Global South (per World Bank statistics), will naturally be attracted to those superpowers most adept at creating a sense of geopolitical “belonging” in larger unions anchored by their large financial markets that facilitate their export-driven growth. We are already witnessing this strategic offering in processes like the EU’s state-accession model and China’s Belt and Road Initiative — despite the recent increase in trade barriers (tariffs) and their effects on international markets.

Employing a “grand strategic” perspective, this MOOC is the first to explore that cluster of tectonic changes as they transform our world, offering competitive advantages to some international businesses while generating lessons and understanding for anyone involved in information technology, economic policy, foreign markets, and foreign direct investment.

Scientists estimates that species the world over are forced by climate change to increase their evolutionary speed by roughly 10,000 times. The same will be true of humans and all their enterprises: reconfiguring national borders, disrupting labor markets, reshaping capital markets, triggering financial crises, altering how and why multinational corporations engage in outsourcing, and altering global capitalism and its free trade rule-set to its very core.

In combination, climate change, demographic transitions and the emergence of a global majority middle class alter the very nature of economic activity this century (liberalization of investments, role of trade agreements, strategic partnerships among great powers), sending different countries down wildly different paths that beg the question: Exactly what is globalization going forward?

In sum, if broad-framing macroeconomic change is a skill-set you want to master, this course lays the groundwork for your understanding of how globalization affects us all by altering our planet, transforming our societies, and recasting this world order of American creation.

Thomas Barnett

About me

Courses and Programs taught by Thomas Barnett