Coronavirus won’t halt globalisation – but it will change it for good

Globalisation has proven fragile, writes Hamish McRae. When we piece it back together, it could look dramatically different

A worker at the Amazon fulfilment centre on Ffordd Amazon, Skewen (Getty Images)

The car factories in Germany are starting up again; housebuilders in Britain are reopening their sites; New York banks are figuring out how to balance home-working and office-based teams so that finance gets back to work. But if America and Europe are gradually getting back to business, it will be a very different international environment from the one before lockdown.

Some elements are clear. There will for at least two or three years be less international travel, either for pleasure or for work. There is a sub-debate here about whether we have seen “peak air travel” – whether the volume of passenger flights will never recover. If so, this would upend many of the assumptions we make of the global economy for the next 30 years.

It is clear, too, that online retail will continue to cut away at physical shops, with far-reaching consequences for High Street Britain, Main Street America and land use more generally.