The global economic crisis, which has been triggered in late 2008 by an unprecedented
financial crisis, has soon taken on vast proportions. The crisis resulted in a generalized
recession in all OECD countries and in most emerging economies, which is fundamentally
challenging the direction of future trade flows and the sense of present trade organizational
arrangements. Dependable factors (the stability of the world’s financial institutions, continuous
and sustainable GDP growth, the reliance on the backbone economies of the OECD) and
unfailing certainties (government intervention on the economy, the superiority of widely
applied logistics concepts) are put in question and contested if not opposed.