Trade volumes hit records even as supply chains buckle. The QI Group executive chairman explains why the global economy is not fragmenting — it is restructuring, and regions are leading the way.
Deglobalization makes for a compelling headline. It does not, however, describe what is actually happening to world trade.
Record-breaking trade volumes, a wave of new regional agreements and accelerating digital payment infrastructure tell a more complicated story — one that Vijay Eswaran, executive chairman of the QI Group, has been tracking closely through his work with the World Economic Forum.
His argument, laid out in a recent WEF analysis, is that the forces disrupting global commerce are not dismantling the system. They are forcing it to rebuild around different priorities. “Rather than portending the end of globalization, these pressures signal its redesign more than its end,” he writes.
The Assumption That No Longer Holds
For most of the past half-century, global commerce operated on a single governing logic: efficiency. Produce wherever costs are lowest. Ship wherever routes are fastest. Move capital wherever returns are greatest. The system delivered extraordinary prosperity, connecting markets across continents and embedding them in shared supply chains.
What it could not deliver was durability. Geopolitical friction, climate shocks and cascading logistics failures have exposed the cost of building a global economy on the assumption of perpetual stability. Container shipping costs rose 40% year-on-year in 2025. Tariff escalations rerouted more than $400 billion in global trade flows in that year alone. Middle East tensions put pressure on energy markets and shipping corridors simultaneously.
A World Economic Forum report now describes global value chains as operating under conditions of structural volatility, and nearly three in four business leaders identify resilience investment as a growth priority. The era of efficiency-first globalization has passed. What replaces it is still taking shape.
Eswaran’s position is that the replacement will be built around regions. “While the old model of globalization was built to maximize efficiency, the emerging one must be built to maximize resilience,” he writes.
How Vijay Eswaran Frames the Case for Regionalism
Regionalization is often framed as a retreat, a turning inward after decades of open borders and integrated markets. Eswaran pushes back on that reading directly. Regions, he argues, are the infrastructure that makes global cooperation more practical, not less.
A functioning regional ecosystem shortens response times when disruptions hit, distributes risk across shorter supply chains and builds the kind of trust that makes broader cooperation possible. Firms are already acting on this logic. UNCTAD has documented a broad shift away from narrow nearshoring toward multi-region diversification as companies seek flexibility over optimization.
The trade architecture reflects the same trend. The World Trade Organization listed 381 regional trade agreements in force as of March 2026. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership covers 15 countries, accounting for about 30% of global GDP and roughly a third of the world’s population. ASEAN’s Digital Economy Framework Agreement, still under negotiation, would harmonize rules across data flows, e-commerce, cybersecurity and payments across one of the fastest-growing economic zones on earth.
“Regions create the conditions under which trade, talent, capital and innovation can continue to move with greater confidence,” Eswaran writes. The ASEAN secretary-general has projected that the bloc’s digital economy alone could reach $2 trillion by 2030.
Infrastructure, Intelligence and the Limits of Reshoring
Technology is the third pillar of Eswaran’s argument. Artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure are converting supply chains from fixed, sequential systems into adaptive ones — capable of anticipating disruptions and rerouting around them before costs compound.
Cross-border payments are another front. Project Nexus, led by BIS, is building common infrastructure to link domestic instant payment systems internationally, enabling settlement in most cases within 60 seconds. OECD modeling puts the potential return from a 10% improvement in border automation and customs coordination at an 18% increase in global goods exports.
The case for pure reshoring, by contrast, does not survive scrutiny. OECD projections estimate that large-scale relocalization of production would reduce global trade by more than 18% and lower global real GDP by over 5%, with no reliable resilience gain to show for it.
What makes the new model work, Eswaran argues, is not technology alone. “In an uncertain world, trust is part of the economic system. Dialogue is a practical tool for solving problems,” he writes. Leaders who can build confidence across competing interests will determine whether the redesign holds.
“The next phase of globalization will not be built only by markets or machines but by leaders and institutions willing to create systems that are resilient, cooperative and humane,” Eswaran concludes. The record $33 trillion in world trade recorded in 2024 suggests the rebuild is well underway.
