Maybe this isn’t news to anyone, but if you’re into international trade and do not shy away from a few stats or a graph, I highly recommend this post at VoxEU. It’s a short article that tracks trade flows and compares individual country stats to some aggregate numbers.

Here’s the bottom line:

[P]eriods of abrupt decline of total trade flows were not uncommon at the individual country level, but these drops were not occurring simultaneously. The unique feature in the current crisis is the negative growth rates exceeding -10%, from November 2008 onwards for all six countries depicted, with the fall increasing to more than 20% as of January 2009.

So why has this happened? The culprit, says the authors, is globalization.

[T]he great synchronisation underlying the current collapse suggests that is probably their interaction rather than their individual effects that may explain what has happened to international trade.

Back in the late 90s when Asia was experiencing financial turmoil, the term “contagion” was all the rage. There were a lot of lessons to be learned from the Asian Financial Crisis, some of which unfortunately have led to our current global imbalances problem, but certainly the need for more international cooperation and coordination should have been readily apparent.

If the current situation with global trade suggests even more synchronization, doesn’t that suggest the need for even more international coordination?

Maybe I’m crazy, but as time goes on and as global problems loom ever larger (in addition to financial crises, you’ve got climate change, scarce resource allocation, poverty, terrorism and epidemics — to name a few), I think that eventually the concepts of “nation” and “national sovereignty” are going to get in the way of solving real problems.