Globalization needs rebooting not rejecting

President Xi Jinping's powerful message on economic globalization delivered in Davos elicited an exceptionally warm response worldwide. His call for the international community to work together to make economic globalization work for all has rekindled hope and confidence in the process which has been losing steam and even direction.

To be fair, economic globalization has done the world enormous good in the past few decades. Enabled by much freer flows of trade, capital and people, economic globalization has allowed resources, investment and technology to diffuse from the West to its vast developing "periphery", delivering unprecedented prosperity to many countries.

However, economic globalization now stands at a crossroad, weighed down by its inherent weaknesses and mismanagement. Given its profit-seeking nature, capital, when unregulated, inevitably creates winners and losers wherever markets operate. When the going gets tough as in the wave of the 2008 financial crisis, the growing wealth gaps become especially stark.