An article by Ian Kilbride and published in IOL Forecasting is a risky endevour. Yet, structural forces, that is, those that shape the system change less rapidly than we might expect year-on-year and provide the contours of continuity. What is difficult to foresee is the possibility of discontinuity, or so-called black swan events. The outbreak of the global Covid pandemic in 2020 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 constitute the two most notable disjuncture’s of recent times, the impact of which continue to generate uncertainty when thinking through the global prospects for 2023. Nonetheless, a number of trends, factors and forces can reasonably be anticipated and which provide the broad parameters of the year ahead. The most notable structural change at the global level is the disruption of the pattern of globalisation itself. With few exceptions, since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, globalisation has been accepted as an immutable force that propels the rapid spread of global trade, investment and finance, but equally forcefully perforates national borders and erodes national identities. Yet, the globalists mantra that countries in the same value chain don’t go to war has now been exploded as a myth by the […]
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