This is not to say that globalization and trade are one and the same. Globalization entails many other features, including the surge in cross-border financial transactions and tourism, data exchange, and other economic activities. In fact, these other interconnections have fed back into trade, as they have enabled the emergence of global value chains, whereby different steps of the production process occur in different countries.
But this phenomenon has been overestimated. According to the World Trade Organization, the foreign value-added contained in exports is only around 15% for most large economies, such as the United States and the European Union. In other words, global value chains have little impact on these larger trading economies.