Latin America and the Globalization Myth

Speakers

• Shannon K. O'Neil, Vice President and Senior Fellow for Latin America Studies, Council on Foreign Relations 
• Brian Winter, Vice President of Policy, AS/COA; Editor-in-Chief, Americas Quarterly

Shannon K. O'Neil released her book The Globalization Myth: Why Regions Matter (Yale University Press, October 2022), in which she offers a powerful case for why regionalization, not globalization, has been the biggest economic trend of the last 40 years, in conversation with Brian Winter. “Globalization has just not been as widespread and pervasive as we tend to think,” O’Neil said. “Actually, what we see is that three big regions rode this wave—an Asian one, a European one, and somewhat a North American one.”

When asked about the potential for nearshoring in the Americas, O’Neil noted that “increasingly as geopolitics guides economics,” this trend will become more prominent over the next decade. In response to Winter’s question about what is needed to encourage the regionalization of trade in Latin America, O’Neil pointed to logistics improvements and “a sense that we're all on it together. If we're all pulling our oars at the same speed together, we'll get there much faster, go much further, and be more prosperous than if we try to go it alone.”