The Misthinking of Globalization—Past, Present, and Future
March 5, 2018, 5:30–7 p.m., Gleacher Center
This talk will challenge the way you think about globalization. Everyone knows globalization is a process—driven forward by falling trade and communication costs—that is integrating national economies around the world. This view is incomplete.
This provocative talk argues that globalization should be viewed as two processes, not one. The first is the traditional view where more goods crossing borders integrates economies. The second started when the ICT Revolution made it feasible for G7 firms to unbundle their factories and shift some production stages to low-wage nations. To coordinate the whole, G7 firms brought their firm-specific know-how along with the offshored stages. Flows of know-how, investment, training, services, and people that used to happen only inside factories in G7 nations are now a part of international commerce.
The resulting north-to-south flows of know-how transformed global economic realities—giving rise to the Emerging Economies, the commodity super-cycle, and much more.
The talk concludes with conjectures on what this means for future globalization. It argues that digital technology will bring globalisation to the service sector via machine translation, better substitutes for face-to-face, and international freelancing platforms like UpWork.com.
The Myron Scholes Global Markets Forum is part of the Initiative on Global Markets (IGM) and is generously sponsored by Myron Scholes.
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