India, May 21 -- The global economy, in the last three decades, became used to free trade under a multilateral framework. It is important to mention the framework because trade was not necessarily devoid of all restrictions: Trade operated in a rules-based framework with the World Trade Organization as the most important adjudicator. The first attacks on this framework came a decade ago with the 2016 victories of Donald Trump and Brexit. The overbearing message of these two political trends was that globalisation had short-changed many people even in the advanced capitalist world. While the Global South has been complaining about globalisation not bringing unambiguous gains, the Trumpist response to this problem is more transactional than structural. Trump believes the US is capable of renegotiating its trading contract with the world, one country at a time, to undo its globalisation losses. Everybody else, having taken the US's cue, has followed suit. The world is now witnessing free-flowing bilateral trade negotiations instead of free-flowing trade. To be sure, many of them are works in progress (or threats in progress in the US's case) than done deals. Can a deals-based trading order be better than a rules-based trading order for the global economy? There are two ways to look at this question. A country, especially a big one such as the US, can hope to get some concessions in terms of tariff and non-tariff barriers while making these deals.And countries such as India can use such deals to optimally exploit opening a part of their market to gain/preserve more trade and movement of persons and opportunities in advanced countries. However, this is not the entire story. Tinkering at the margins, which is what tariff negotiations in bilateral trade deals represent, will do nothing to address the fundamental asymmetry in global value chains where most of the physical production is carriedoutby cheap labour in emerging markets even though the bulk of the profits of this work are harvested by companies located in advanced economies. Mechanically going after the former without addressing the latter will only generate inflation and chaos, which is exactly why Trump had to back down on Chinese tariffs. The crux of the problem is not finding some optimal tariff matrix. It is bringing globalisation in sync with democracy. This requires a more broad-based economic agenda than just trade talks....