Essay 1
By Jeremiah Zio
(Jaz6@students.uwf.edu)
09/08/2017
An overview of Globalization can be seen as a means of being intertwined with the rest of
the world to where we are reshaping our cultures, political, legal, and economical aspects of living.
Globalization first began as a means to interconnect cultures, goods, services and ideas together
from all around the world. The expediting of products, services and ideological innovations from
all three tiers of third world, second world and world power markets introduced a significant
amount of progression that the world has not seen since prior to the Great Depression era. Before
going any further, understanding the influence of globalization and international business would
help immensely with understanding their impact around the world. In the Wild and Wild
Textbook, there are a few insights given from how globalization is changing the world around us.
For example, Apple products are globalized to a point where they do not have to be modified,
while being sold in almost every country around the world without having to ramp up its
production and marketing costs.
International business on the other hand can be simplified to any business that crosses the
borders of two or more nations. With globalization, a large amount of businesses and corporations
are outsourcing and moving their operations to other areas around the world. Whether it be for
lower production costs, lower labor costs, or for higher-skilled employees, the number of
companies that are becoming multinational corporations is constantly increasing. As with this, a
more official definition of Globalization can be coined as: the trend toward greater economic,
cultural, political, and technological interdependence among national institutions and economies,
as the Wild and Wild text defines.
Globalization was once mostly viewed as a positive trend around the world, but it is now
looked at, by some, as a harm to cultures and national identity of countries who were once very
sure of their culture, but are now being resolved to have traits from those cultures whom they come
into business with.
The CNN article, Have we reached the end of globalization? reveals that there has been a
significant drop in recent amount of global trade. The Global Public Square Staff noted that
“between 1988 and 2007, global trade grew by 6.2 percent a year according to the World Trade
Organization.” But more recently, the rate of global trade has dropped to a daunting 3.7 percent,
which is about half of the previous rate. The article further goes to presume that, maybe the world
has reached a pinnacle in its trading of goods. This could be a good point, but at the moment, there
are still tons of items being shipped, flown and driven around the world for commerce purposes.
Also, there are companies still planning for greater expansion around the world or their first
expansion into a foreign land. Therefore, as Joshua Cooper Ramo in the CNN article highlights,
globalization may just be coming to a not-so-quiet pause or something worse than that.
In most countries, items we use on the day–to-day are derived from businesses worldwide.
For example, the shoes a kid is wearing in Venezuela, could be from China. The food a Canadian
senator is eating could be from ingredients imported from Chile and Nigeria. A group of students
in Liberia, West Africa could be singing a song that is top charting in the USA. Globalization goes
further than just products; therefore, it is quite hard to decipher whether it is slowing down, taking
a break or plainly coming to a screeching halt.
In the Great Unraveling of Globalization by Jeffrey Rothfeder, he states that Globalization
“was supposed to act like a rising tide, lifting all boats in poor and rich countries alike.” Rothfeder
further goes along to say that despite all this activity and enthusiasm, globalization has not
materialized all the returns that was expected to manifest. Because of this uncertainty and the fact
that returns on globalization is dwindling or barely coming true, more countries are moving
towards protectionist measures to improve domestic businesses and block out foreign expansions.
The World Trade Organization was set in place to ensure fair trading between nations, but
countries are taking it into their own hands with the counter protectionist measures as Jason Miks
states in the CNN article.
Globalization is now seen as a double-edged sword for most people around the world to
