It was one of Joe Biden’s last public remarks before leaving office as US vice-president in January 2017, in an address to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “Globalisation has not been an unalloyed good. I am a free trader, I am a strong supporter of globalisation,” he said. “But it has deepened the rift between those racing ahead at the top, and those struggling to hang on in the middle, or falling to the bottom.”

The remarks are a reminder of the angst over the future of an integrated global economy — and some regret over its political impact — in the wake of the twin blows of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as US president. Four years later the disruptive forces of populism have combined with a pandemic to make the picture even more complicated. The spread of coronavirus this year has hit trade and travel as it plunged many countries into recession. It has also triggered renewed efforts to nationalise supply chains, particularly for key medical equipment and drug ingredients. The tensions in global commerce that flared up in recent years between the US and China — and the UK and the EU — are turning into permanent features of a new and far more precarious economic order.

Yet the ties that have come to increasingly bind the world’s economies together have proved remarkably resilient through this period — so far. At the start of the pandemic, the WTO predicted global trade would fall anywhere between 13 per cent and 32 per cent this year. But by October, the forecast was more optimistic, with global trade dropping by 9.2 per cent, with a rebound in 2021 of 7.2 per cent. “The net result has been a deeper but less prolonged decline in trade, although considerable uncertainty remains about the strength of any recovery going forward,” Yi Xiaozhun, the WTO’s deputy director-general, said as he announced the revised findings.