Economist Dr. Mia Mikic discusses issues in trade policies with students

April 22, 2021: Trade economist Dr. Mia Mikic gave a guest speaker lecture on 'Globalization and Trade Driven Pandemic Recovery: Selected Issues from a Political Economy Perspective', to the students of International Trade Class, where she highlighted the problems in trade policies and discussed possible solutions with the addition of many inventions.

Dr. Mia is currently the Advisor at Large at the Asia Pacific Research and Training Network (ARTNeT), an open network of research, academic institutions, and think-tanks in the Asia-Pacific region. Sharing a presentation, Dr. Mia elaborated on how globalization is a process that keeps changing and factors that contribute to this change. She further discussed trade policy issue and problems due to Covid-19, along with the production and distribution of vaccines related to it.

Maintaining that globalization is often described and not defined, Dr. Mia said it underlines the increasing interrelation of the world's economies and focuses on how change in one factor will affect the wellbeing of another. She shared the statistics from the last 5 centuries for trend and growth of globalization. It was evident that the last period, early 90s, is compressed and thus came across as exponential growth and there was rapid growth of trade until the 2008/2009 financial crisis. Here, there was a sharp fall in terms of annual changes of trade, which means there was no demand in external market for exports.

Moreover, it was discussed that after the disruption from the pandemic, professional services will continue to grow such as education and health, however, much cannot be said about tourism. There will also be a great increase in conversion from physical to digital services and changes in the business model, which will look at resilience as the primary goal rather than efficiency.