Trade doesn’t kill jobs

Even if jobs did return, Western consumers are likely to balk at paying the higher prices that companies would have to charge to reflect the higher input prices — everything from wages to property leases and electricity tariffs — of making those goods at home.

Take television manufacturing. Had that stayed in America, experts say, each set would cost hundreds of dollars more than they do now on average, limiting their affordability. Households would have stuck with one TV in the living room, instead of several dotted around the home.

“Trade doesn’t kill jobs, it protects consumption,” Hicks said, while also stressing that globalisation had created millions more jobs in Western nations’ services and logistics sectors than it has destroyed in industry.

So if those manufacturing jobs are gone forever — and new developments such as machine learning and nanotechnology portend a “Fourth Industrial Revolution” — what can be done to assure the future of workers in the developed world?

Some ideas are in their policy infancy, such as a universal basic income, but others are well-known and perhaps more pressing than ever, including better education and re-training.

Such discussions will inform the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, coming up in the same week that sees Trump inaugurated as the 45th US president on January 20.

“We are at some kind of turning point in history,” WEF founder Klaus Schwab said. “We need new concepts. We cannot have just populist solutions.”