A reconfiguration of global trade is under way. McKinsey Global Institute director and senior partner Olivia White and coauthors find that this process could take one of two forms. Under the first scenario, heightened trade frictions between geopolitically distant economies would lead to an increasingly fragmented “deglobalized” world, in which trade reorients toward flowing between geopolitically aligned economies. Under the second scenario, trade diversification—or reducing import concentration—could involve trade relationships in which no economy is overly dependent on any other for its imports. Click through the interactive to see more.
To read the report, see “Geopolitics and the geometry of global trade,” January 17, 2024.