Date: September 23, 2025

Time: 5:30 pm to 7 pm ET (5:30 keynote and 6:15 pm debate)

Location: Virtual

Fee for attendance: None

We are pleased to invite you to virtually attend this keynote fireside chat and debate as our guest. This is a virtual event. There will be some in person attendees who are guests of the two co-hosting organizations.

Is the current movement towards deglobalization just part of a cycle that has had its ups and downs, or are we in a structural movement towards a more permanent isolation of countries from a trade and economic point of view?

The topic of deglobalization has never been more prominent than it is today. The topic has been elevated in importance for some time now as we have seen dramatic changes in country trade practices, relative manufacturing and service strengths, economic trends, and political positions. The tariff situation brought about by the U.S. recently has made it even more consequential today.

Professor Joseph Stiglitz, the renowned Nobel Prize winning economist and Columbia University Professor will start the event and speak on the issue in a fireside chat.

His talk will be followed by a debate featuring two leading experts who have written heavily on the topic and will argue the opposite sides of the question: Professor Walden Bello and Professor Edward Ashbee. Both are experts on the debate topic and Professor Bello, in fact, has been credited with first coining the phrase “deglobalization” over 20 years ago.

The debate format will follow the traditional opening statements, rebuttals and closing statement procedure. However, it will be unique in that we will survey the audience at the start in an electronic poll and ask them which side of the argument they would take, share the results with the in person and virtual audience, and then poll the audience again for their opinions at the end to see how the debate may have influenced the audience’s view.

Moderator:

Peter Young, Committee of 100 Member and Board Member, CEO of Young & Partners, the investment banking firm

Keynote Speaker Bio:

Professor Joseph Stiglitz

A graduate of Amherst College, Professor Stiglitz received his PHD from MIT in 1967, became a full professor at Yale in 1970, and in 1979 was awarded the John Bates Clark Award, given biennially by the American Economic Association to the economist under 40 who has made the most significant contribution to the field. He has taught at Princeton, Stanford, MIT and was the Drummond Professor and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is now University Professor at Columbia University in New York. He is also the Co-Founder and Co-President of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia and Chief Economist of the Roosevelt Institute. In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his analyses of markets with asymmetric information, and he was a lead author of the 1995 Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. In 2011, Time named Stiglitz one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Stiglitz was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1993–95, served as CEA chairman from 1995–97, and Chief Economist and Senior Vice-President of the World Bank from 1997–2000. He chaired the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, which released its final report in September 2009 (published as Mismeasuring Our Lives). He now chairs a High Level Expert Group at the OECD attempting to further advance these ideas. In 2009 he was appointed by the President of the United Nations General Assembly as chair of the Commission of Experts on Reform of the International Financial and Monetary System, which also released its report in September 2009 (published as The Stiglitz Report). Since the 2008 financial crisis, he has played an important role in the creation of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), which seeks to reform the discipline so it is better equipped to find solutions to the great challenges of the 21st century.

Stiglitz helped create a new branch of economics, "The Economics of Information," exploring the consequences of information asymmetries and pioneering such pivotal concepts as adverse selection and moral hazard, which have now become standard tools not only of theorists, but of policy analysts. He has made major contributions to macroeconomics and monetary theory, development economics and trade theory, public and corporate finance, theories of industrial organization and rural organization, and theories of welfare economics and income and wealth distribution. In the 1980s, he helped revive interest in the economics of R&D.

His work has helped explain the circumstances in which markets do not work well, and how selective government intervention can improve their performance.

Recognized around the world as a leading economic educator, he has written textbooks that have been translated into more than a dozen languages. His book Globalization and Its Discontents (W.W. Norton, 2001) was translated into 35 languages and sold more than one million copies worldwide.

Bios of the Debaters

Professor Walden Bello

Walden Bello is concurrently the International Adjunct Professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton, Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University, and Co-Chairperson of the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South.

He has written regularly about the issue of deglobalization and has emerged as one of the leading critics of the current model of economic globalization and the international case against corporate-driven globalization.

He is the author or co-author of 25 books, including Counterrevolution: The Global Rise of the Far Right (Nova Scotia: Fernwood, 2019), Paper Dragons: China and the Next Crash (London: Bloomsbury/Zed, 2019), Food Wars (London: Verso, 2009), Capitalism’s Last Stand? (London: Zed, 2013), Dragons in Distress: Asia’s Miracle Economies in Crisis (London: Penguin, 1990), and Development Debacle: The World Bank in the Philippines (San Francisco: Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1982).

Bello got his BA from the Ateneo de Manila University in 1966 and his PhD in sociology from Princeton University in 1975.

He received the Right Livelihood Award (also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize) in Stockholm in 2003 for his work showing the negative impact of corporate-driven globalization. He was also named Outstanding Public Scholar by the International Studies Association in San Francisco in 2008. He has honorary doctorates from Panteion University in Athens (2006) and Murdoch University in Perth (2012).

Professor Edward Ashbee

Edward Ashbee is Professor in the Department of International Economics, Government and Business at Copenhagen Business School. His books include Deglobalization (2024), Countering China: US Responses to the Belt and Road Initiative (2023) and US Politics Today (4th edition, 2019). He was recently appointed to be the Danish Head of the Educational Programme for Public Management and Social Development.

In his most recent book on Deglobalization published in 2024, Edward Ashbee examines the globalizing processes of the past thirty years and considers the extent to which there has been "deglobalization" or "slowbalization" and the reasons for these apparent shifts.

The book looks at the original promise held out by globalizing trends which became fully evident at the same time as the dot.com economy became part of everyday life. The book then charts the backlash against "globalism" and the ways in which it became pronounced across much of Europe, North America and Asia. And it asks how far has that backlash, together with the 2008 financial crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the rise of "techno-nationalism" led to a stalling or even reversal in globalizing processes.

The analysis disaggregates the different trends that collectively constitute "globalization" and surveys competing perspectives on globalization and reviews the arguments of those who argue that the concept is either myth or hyperbole.

The Committee of 100

The Committee of 100 (C100) is a non-profit, non-partisan leadership organization of prominent Chinese Americans in business, government, academia, and the arts founded 37 years ago. The Committee’s purpose is to provide leadership and act as a constructive force in the dual mission of promoting the full participation of all Chinese Americans in American society and acting as a public policy resource for the Chinese-American community and advancing constructive dialogue and relationships between the peoples and leaders of the United States and Greater China.

The organization’s website is https://www.committee100.org.

The Foreign Policy Association

Founded in 1918, the mission of the Foreign Policy Association has beento serve as a catalyst for developing awareness, understanding, and informed opinion on U.S. foreign policy and global issues. Through its balanced, nonpartisan programs and publications, the FPA encourages citizens to participate in the foreign policy process and has been a leader in expanding public knowledge of international affairs. It is famous for its World Leadership Forums and its highly regarded Great Decisions program which serves the public as the nation's largest discussion program on U.S. foreign policy across the country and distributed to 1,100 university and college campuses.

The organization’s website is https://fpa.org.

“Is Deglobalization Inevitable?”Virtual Attendance Registration