2025-11-21
32 分钟Until 1989, comparing economic systems across the world was relatively simple.
You had market democracies of the West, the socialist economies of the Soviet bloc,
China and satellite countries,
and finally the large number of poor-to-middle-income non-aligned countries.
How you described and how you evaluated these systems,
let alone the interaction between them, depended quite profoundly on your political perspective.
But a lot has changed since then.
The Old West has become less economically dominant and less liberal.
Soviet central planning collapsed and previously socialist countries have turned to various forms of capitalism.
Many formerly poor countries in what is now called the Global South have grown rapidly.
And then, of course, there's China.
If the past global economic order has disappeared and the present is not the victory of Western market liberalism that we expected,
what global economic system are we going to end up with in the future?
I'm Martin Sandbu,
the FT's European Economics commentator and author of the free lunch newsletter on global economic policy.
And to answer my questions, I'm speaking to Branko Milanovic.
Milanovic is a senior scholar at the Stone Center on socioeconomic inequality at the City University of New York and a visiting professor at the International Inequalities Institute at the LSE.
He was formerly a World Bank economist and has authored several books.
The newest of which has just come out.
It is called the Great Global Transformation, National Market Liberalism in a Multipolar World.