Warm up
Questions
- What is globalization?
- What contributes to globalization and what results from globalization?
- Does globalization lead to income disparity? What are the (other) factors that cause income disparity?
- What measures are adopted to gauge globalization?
Background
Globalization
"Globalization" is a fairly new term. Professor Theodore Levitt, a marketing professor at the Harvard Business School, apparently first employed it in a 1983 article in the Harvard Business Review. It is arguable, however, that the basic concept dates to the first humans. Defined broadly, globalization is the process of integrating nations and peoples—politically, economically, and culturally—into a larger community. In this broad sense, it is little different from internationalization. Yet globalization is more than this incremental process that over the centuries has brought people and nations closer together as technological innovation dissolved barriers of time and distance, and enhanced flows of information promoted greater awareness and understanding.
The focus, as the term suggests, is not on nations but on the entire globe. Consequently, a more sophisticated definition might emphasize that contemporary globalization is a complex, controversial, and synergistic process in which improvements in technology (especially in communications and transportation) combine with the deregulation of markets and open borders to bring about vastly expanded flows of people, money, goods, services, and information. This process integrates people, businesses, nongovernmental organizations, and nations into larger networks. Globalization promotes convergence, harmonization, efficiency, growth, and, perhaps, democratization and homogenization.
It should not be narrowly confused with economic globalization, which is only one aspect, however important it is. In that respect, there are several definitions, many of which mention the increasing connectivity of economies and ways of life across the world. While some scholars and observers of globalization stress convergence of patterns of production and consumption and a resulting homogenization of culture, others stress that globalization has the potential to take many diverse forms.
In economics, globalization is the convergence of prices, products, wages, rates of interest and profits towards developed country norms. Globalization of the economy depends on the role of human migration, international trade, movement of capital, and integration of financial markets. The International Monetary Fund notes the growing economic interdependence of countries worldwide through increasing volume and variety of cross-border transactions, free international capital flows, and more rapid and widespread diffusion of technology. Theodore Levitt is usually credited with globalization's first use in an economic context.
There are two principal drivers to globalization: technological innovation and changing ideas about how to organize and regulate economic activity. Rapidly changing technologies for transportation and communications continue to dissolve the barriers of time, distance, and ignorance that once complicated long-range relationships. Ideas also shape globalization, particularly the widespread belief that free trade, private enterprise, and competitive markets promote efficiency and economic growth. Another set of ideas also influences the globalization process: the belief among international lawyers that harmonization of standards, rules, and legal systems is the most appropriate way to resolve business conflicts. The impact of technology and ideas are the building blocks of globalization. The globalization process has other independent drivers.
Measuring globalization
Looking specifically at economic globalization, it can be measured in different ways. These centre around the four main economic flows that characterize globalization:
· Goods and services, e.g. exports plus imports as a proportion of national income or per capita of population
· Labor/people, e.g. net migration rates; inward or outward migration flows, weighted by population
· Capital, e.g. inward or outward direct investment as a proportion of national income or per head of population
· Technology, e.g. international research & development flows; proportion of populations (and rates of change thereof) using particular inventions (especially 'factor-neutral' technological advances such as the telephone, motorcar, broadband)
Effects of Globalization
Globalization has various aspects which affect the world in several different ways such as:
· Industrial (alias trans nationalization) — emergence of worldwide production markets and broader access to a range of foreign products for consumers and companies
· Financial — emergence of worldwide financial markets and better access to external financing for corporate, national and sub-national borrowers
· Economic — realization of a global common market, based on the freedom of exchange of goods and capital
· Political — political globalization is the creation of a world government which regulates the relationships among nations and guarantees the rights arising from social and economic globalization
· Informational - increase in information flows between geographically remote locations
· Cultural — growth of cross-cultural contacts; advent of new categories of consciousness and identities such as Globalism - which embodies cultural diffusion, the desire to consume and enjoy foreign products and ideas, adopt new technology and practices, and participate in a "world culture"
· Ecological — the advent of global environmental challenges that can not be solved without international cooperation, such as climate change, cross-boundary water and air pollution, over-fishing of the ocean, and the spread of invasive species. Many factories are built in developing countries where they can pollute freely
· Social — the achievement of free circulation by people of all nations
· Transportation — fewer and fewer European cars on European roads each year (the same can also be said about American cars on American roads) and the death of distance through the incorporation of technology to decrease travel time
· Greater international cultural exchange
Spreading of multiculturalism, and better individual access to cultural diversity (e.g. through the export of Hollywood and Bollywood movies). However, the imported culture can easily supplant the local culture, causing reduction in diversity through hybridization or even assimilation. The most prominent form of this is Westernization, but Sinicization of cultures has taken place over most of Asia for many centuries.
Greater international travel and tourism
Greater immigration, including illegal immigration
Spread of local consumer products (e.g. food) to other countries (often adapted to their culture)
· Technical/legal
Development of a global telecommunications infrastructure and greater trans-border data flow, using such technologies as the Internet, communication satellites, submarine fiber optic cable, and wireless telephones.
Increase in the number of standards applied globally; e.g. copyright laws, patents and world trade agreements.
The push by many advocates for an international criminal court and international justice movements.
economic integration
Economic integration is a term used to describe how different aspects between economies are integrated. The basics of this theory were written by the Hungarian Economist Béla Balassa in the 1960s. As economic integration increases, the barriers of trade between markets diminishes. The most integrated economy today, between independent nations, is the European Union and its euro zone.
The degree of economic integration can be categorized into six stages:
· Preferential trading area
· Free trade area
· Customs union
· Common market
· Economic and monetary union
· Complete economic integration
Economic integration also tends to precede political integration. In fact, Balassa believed that supranational common markets, with their free movement of economic factors across national borders, naturally generate demand for further integration, not only economically (via monetary unions) but also politically--and, thus, that economic communities naturally evolve into political unions over time.
information technology
Information technology, as defined by the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), is "the study, design, development, implementation, support or management of computer-based information systems, particularly software applications and computer hardware." Encompassing the computer and information systems industries, information technology is the capability to electronically input, process, store, output, transmit, and receive data and information, including text, graphics, sound, and video, as well as the ability to control machines of all kinds electronically.
Information technology is comprised of computers, networks, satellite communications, robotics, videotext, cable television, electronic mail ("e-mail"), electronic games, and automated office equipment. The information industry consists of all computer, communications, and electronics-related organizations, including hardware, software, and services. Completing tasks using information technology results in rapid processing and information mobility, as well as improved reliability and integrity of processed information.
Recently it has become popular to broaden the term to explicitly include the field of electronic communication so that people tend to use the abbreviation ICT (Information and Communications Technology).
Today, the term information technology has ballooned to encompass many aspects of computing and technology, and the term is more recognizable than ever before. The information technology umbrella can be quite large, covering many fields. IT professionals perform a variety of duties that range from installing applications to designing complex computer networks and information databases. A few of the duties that IT professionals perform may include data management, networking, engineering computer hardware, database and software design, as well as the management and administration of entire systems.
Integrated Information Systems With today's sophisticated hardware, software, and communications technology, it is often difficult to classify a system as belonging uniquely to one specific application program. Organizations increasingly are consolidating their information needs into a single, integrated information system. One example is SAP, a German software package that runs on mainframe computers and provides an enterprise-wide solution for information technology. It is a powerful database that enables companies to organize all their data into a single database, then choose only the program modules or tables they want. The freestanding modules are customized to fit each customer's needs.
Internet
The Internet is a worldwide, publicly accessible series of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using the standard Internet Protocol (IP). It is a "network of networks" that consists of millions of smaller domestic, academic, business, and government networks, which together carry various information and services, such as electronic mail, electronic commerce (e-commerce), online chat, file transfer, and the interlinked Web pages and other documents of the World Wide Web.
The Internet started in 1969 as the Advanced Research Project Agency Net (ARPAnet). Funded by the U.S. government, the ARPAnet became a series of high-speed links between major supercomputer sites and educational and research institutions worldwide, although mostly in the U.S. A major part of its backbone was the National Science Foundation's NSFNet. Along the way, it became known as the "Internet" or simply "the Net." By the 1990s, so many networks had become part of it and so much traffic was not educational or pure research that it became obvious that the Internet was on its way to becoming a commercial venture.
In 1995, the Internet was turned over to large commercial Internet providers (ISPs), such as MCI, Sprint and UUNET, which took responsibility for the backbones and have increasingly enhanced their capacities ever since. Regional ISPs link into these backbones to provide lines for their subscribers, and smaller ISPs hook either directly into the national backbones or into the regional ISPs.
Internet Protocol (IP) 互联网协议
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) 超文本链接标示语言
Uniform Resource Locator (URL) 在Internet的WWW服务程序上用于指定信息位置的表示方法
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) 超文本转移协议
