Pervez Ghauri - Globalization

The positive interpretation of the word globalization, or its early equivalent Americanizationreflecting US global power and influenceprimarily denoted a process of opening up of commercial and investment opportunities in new and often distant markets, leading to economic integration. Proponents of this positive view claimed that there would be a trickle-down effect by which capital would filter down from rich to poor countriesand thus lead to a fairer, more democratic and peaceful world.

Opponents of globalization, however, warn that it reduces the ability of nation-states to control their economies. They also raise ethical objections to the exploitation of developing markets and the imposition of Western values on indigenous cultures.

Whatever the interpretation, for the consumer globalization increasingly means that an everyday producta television set, for instancemight be designed in one country, manufactured in another using materials or components sourced from a third, marketed through a call center in a fourth, for delivery and use in any number of others. As such, labels of origin have clearly lost their meaning.

For business, the opportunities are unprecedented. UN estimates for 1990 showed some 35,000 multinational corporations with 150,000 foreign affiliates, and total stock of foreign direct investment worldwide of $1.7 trillion. Today there are believed to be some 60,000 such corporations. However, not all multinationals are big businesses. As new technology and management innovations promote entrepreneurial agility over size, a new size of multinationalthe micro-multinationalhas emerged.

Well before 2000 BCE traders in high-status goods covered the huge distances between Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) and India. The centuries from 1600 to 600 BCE were characterized by power struggles for control of Syria, which lay at the junction of trade routes east to Mesopotamia, westward to Asia Minor and the Aegean, and south to Egypt. These early attempts at empire-building were to be replicated over the centuries in many parts of the world, creating political and military superpowers that united previously disparate kingdoms.