Globalization, Law and Development: Introduction and Overview (Globalization, Law and Development Conference)

The current period of globalization (defined loosely as increasing global economic integration), which began with the liberalization of exchange and capital controls and lowering of trade and investment barriers in the 1980s, is not the first time the world got economically smaller. The period from 1870 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914 was by some measures (such as the percentage of GNP in developed countries derived from overseas investment, and labor migration) marked by more extensive globalization than the post-1980 one. This earlier globalization came to a halt with the hostilities of World War I, followed by the high tariffs and limits on migration in the inter-war period.