First, for some decades now, world trade has been growing  BIS Review 41/2006  1  faster than global economic output. On an average of the past 30 years, world trade has increased one and a half times more than global GDP. In the 1990s, world trade grew more than twice as much as global output.
Accordingly, the openness of many economies – in other words, the ratio of exports plus imports to GDP – showed a substantial increase. In Germany, the ratio last year reached more than 75%. That is very high for a major industrial country. The comparable figure for the United States and Japan is just over 26%.