Several years ago, Nobel-Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote an insightful article, ‘A Country is not a Company’, in which he argued that business leaders need to understand the difference between economic policy on the national and international scale and business strategy on the organisational scale. In other words, and to put it bluntly, CEOs who do not understand economic policy are ill-suited for the role. Little did many realise, including perhaps Krugman himself, that an article written in 1996 would command such resonance almost three decades on.

After all, CEOs of firms that have enjoyed unbridled monopoly power — especially after the emergence of the modern corporation around the turn of the last century — have shown more than a passing tendency to use that market power to their advantage. Examples abound from Standard Oil, Exxon Corporation, IBM, Microsoft, and, more recently, big-tech companies to name a few. Firms engaged in market-based competition play a “zero-sum game” — one gains at the expense of the other. Disciplining errant firms has been accomplished by a combination of market creativity and intervention of anti-trust authorities, but it has been a hard task.

Do nations jostle for competitive advantage on the global stage the same way that firms do locally? Krugman thinks not. International trade, significantly, is not a zero-sum game. According to him, “If the European economy does well, it need not be at US expense; indeed, if anything a successful European economy is likely to help the US economy by providing it with larger markets and selling it goods of superior quality at lower prices.” Historically, that has........

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