The global production
Description:
The global and national economies, as well as individual industries and firms, have undergone a tremendous amount of restructuring in the past several decades. Until the 1970s, the global economy was primarily composed of national companies operating mainly within their borders. The system was characterized by shallow integration versus the deeper integration of today, in which global production systems distribute production across continents and the globe. Linkages across firms and countries have strengthened as trade has greatly expanded and production has moved southward. No longer does a single firm control all of a company’s activities (e.g., General Motors in the 1960s), but rather the system operates from a network-centric perspective and a firm is disconnected from the customers it serves – for instance, Nike now has 900 suppliers and 650,000 workers spread over 50 countries. But while there has been a diffusion of production, the control has solidified on the retail side as a result of consolidation among top-tier firms and a proliferation among potential suppliers.
As an aspect of Economy Globalization, global production act an important role in stimulating the development of glbal economy, as well as facilitate the global communication and integration.
Enablers:
- Substantive R&D cost demands mass production and global market
- reduce production cost
- obtain advanced technology and other technical resource
- ocuppy local market
Inhibitors:
- While production has expanded across the globe, global governance has not been able to match the pace.
- The protection to local national industry hinder global production.
Paradigms:
Emerging paradigms associated with the global production:
- The agricultural trade in fresh fruits and vegetables
- Outsourcing of software to India
Experts:
- Marshal McLuhan
- GVU's WWW survey
- IDC
- Nua Ltd.
Timing:
In a www survey conducted by GUV in 1995, internet connection speed at 14 kb/s had the highest percentage with 33.7%, 32.72%, 22.95% in general part of the world, U.S, and europe respectively. In other words, the most common connection speed is 14 Kb/sec (33.70%) followed by 28 Kb/sec (26.63%). In year 1998, the same survey resulted in 31.4% for connection speed at 56 Kb/sec. This fact however has shown how internet technology has grown rapidly within three years.
In terms of internet usage, internet user has grown from 16 million (0.39% of world population) in December 1995 to 580.78 million (9.75% of world population) in May 2002. Those data are based upon research from Nua Ltd. and IDC respectively. This means internet user had grown 35.3% in seven years from 1995 to 2002. Therefore, in year 2020 we might expect internet will overwhelmingly used by people and become a backbone of human's technology civilization.