Globalisation is not dead. It may not even be dying. But it is changing. In the process, the institutions that shape it, notably the World Trade Organization, are being forced to change, too. We are moving towards a different and far more difficult world. But, in setting our new course, we need to avoid some mistakes. Here are seven.

The first is to focus attention only on trade. As Maurice Obstfeld, former chief economist of the IMF, has noted, today’s fluid global capital markets have generated waves of financial crises, while bringing little evident benefit. Insufficient attention is paid to this reality, largely because the interests in favour of free capital flows are so powerful while their economic impact is so hard for most people to understand.

The second is a belief that the era of globalisation was an economic catastrophe. In a recent note, however, Douglas Irwin of Dartmouth College observes that between 1980 and 2019 virtually all countries became substantially better off, global inequality declined and the share of the world’s population in extreme poverty fell from 42 per cent in 1981 to just 8.6 per cent in 2018. I make no apology for having supported policies with such outcomes.