国际贸易第1章(经济全球化英文版)(共38页).doc

精选优质文档-倾情为你奉上国际贸易第1章(经济全球化英文版)International Trade Chapter I. Globalization LEARNING OBJECTIVES After you have read this chapter you should: LO1 Understand what is meant by the term globalization. LO2 Be familiar with the main drivers of globalization. LO3 Appreciate the changing nature of the global economy. LO4 Understand the main arguments in the debate over the impact of globalization. LO5 Appreciate have the process of globalization is creating opportunities and challenges far business managers. Flat Panel Televisions and the Global Economy They begin as glass panels that are manufactured in high-technology fabrication centers in South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. Operating sophisticated tooling in environments that must be kept absolutely clean, these factories produce sheets of glass twice as large as king size beds to exacting specifications. From there, the glass panels travel to Mexican plants located alongside the border. There they are cut to size, combined with electronic components shipped in from Asia and the United States, assembled into finished TVs, and loaded onto trucks bound for retail stores in the United States. Its a huge business. In 2006, consumers spent some $ billion on flat panel TVs, a 63 percent increase over the amount spent in 2005. Projections call for sales to hit $37 billion by 2008-despite the fact that due to intense competition, prices for flat panel displays have been tumbling and are projected to continue doing so. During 2006 alone, prices for 40-inch flat panel TVs fell from $3,000 to $1,600, bringing them within the reach of many more consumers. In 200? half of all TVs sold in the United States will be flat panel TVs. The underlying technology for flat panel displays was invented in the United States in the late 1960s by RCA. But after RCA and rivals Westinghouse and Xerox opted not to pursue the technology, the Japanese company Sharp made aggressive investments in flat panel displays. By the early 1990s Sharp was selling the first flat panel screens, but as the Japanese economy plunged into a decade-long recession, investment leadership shifted to South Korean companies such as Samsung. Then the 1997 Asian crisis hit Korea hard, and Taiwanese companies seized leadership. Today, Chinese companies are starting to elbow their way into the flat panel display manufacturing business. As production for flat panel displays migrates its way around the globe to low-cost locations, clear winners and losers have emerged. One obvious winner has been U. S. consumers, who have benefited from the falling prices of flat panel TVs and are snapping them up Other winners include efficient manufacturers who have taken advantage of globally dispersed supply chains to make and sell low-cost, high-quality flat panel TVs. Foremost among these has been the California-based company, Vizio. Founded by a Taiwanese immigrant, in just four years sales of Vizio flat panel TVs ballooned from nothing to $700 million in 2006. The company is forecasting sales as high as $2 billion for 2007. Vizio, however, has only 75 employees. These employees focus on final product design, sales. and customer service, while Vizio outsources most of its engineering work, all of its manufacturing, and much of its logistics. For each of its models, Vizio assembles a team of supplier partners strung across the globe. Its 42-inch flat panel TV, for example, contains a panel from South Korea, electronic components from China, and processors from the United States, and it is assembled in Mexico. Vizios managers scour the globe continually for the cheapest manufacturers of flat panel displays and electronic components. They sell most of their TVs to large discount retailers such as Costco and Sams Club. Good order visibility from retailers, coupled with tight management of global logistics, allows Vizio to turn over its inventory every three weeks, twice as fast as many of its competitors which is a major source of cost saving in a business where prices are falling continually. If Vizio exemplifies the winners in this global industry, the losers include the employees of manufacturers who make traditional cathode ray TVs in high-cost locations. In 2006, for example, Japanese electronics manufacturer Sanyo laid off 300 employees at its factory, and another Japanese company, Hitachi, closed its TV manufacturing plant in South Carolina, laying off 200 employees. Both Sony and Hitachi, of course, still make TVs, but they are flat panel TVs assembled in Mexico from components manufactured in Asia. Introduction A fundamental shift is occurring, in the world economy. We are moving away from a world in which national economies were relatively self-contained entities, isolated from each other by barriers to cross-border trade and investment; by distance, time zones, and language; ard by national differences in government regulation, culture, and business systems. And we are moving toward a world in which harriers to cross-border trade and investment are declining; perceived distance is shrinking, due to advances in transportation and telecommunications technology; material culture is starting to look similar the world over; and national economies are merging into an interdependent, integrated global economic system. The process by which this is occurring is commonly referred to as globalization. What is happening, in the fiat panel TV Industry, which was profiled in the Opening Case, is a classic illustration of the impact of globalization. Production of flat panel TVs is migrating around the globe to low-cost locations. TVs that Vizio sells in the United States, for example, ale assembled in Mexico from flat panels manufactured in South Korea, electronic components made in China, and microprocessors made in the United States. By dispersing different activities around the globe to where they can be performed most efficiently, and then coordinating, the entire production process, companies like Vizio can deliver flat panel TVs to American consumers at much lower prices than would otherwise be possible. American consumers benefit from the lower price, as doe; Vizio and its strategic partners in South Korea, China, the United States. and Mexico. The process of globalization also has losers, however, and the losers in this case are workers in high cost locations who have lost their jobs. As we will see in this book whether globalization benefits or harms national economies. We will look at what economic theory has to say about the outsourcing of manufacturing and service jobs to places such as India and China and at the benefits and costs of outsourcing, not just to business firms and their employees, but also to entire economies. First, though, we need to get a better overview of the nature and process o f globalization, and that is the function of the current chapter. What Is Globalization? As used in this book, globalization refers to the shift toward a more integrated and interdependent world economy. Globalization has several facets, including the globalization of markets and the globalization of production. THE GLOBALIZATION OF MARKETS The globalization of markets refers to the merging of historically distinct and separate national markets into one huge global marketplace. Falling barriers to cross-border trade have made it easier to sell internationally. It has been argued for some time that the tastes and preferences o f consumers in different nations are beginning to converge on some global norm, thereby helping to create a global market. Consumer products such as Citigroup credit cards, Coca-Cola soft drinks. Sony PlayStation video games, McDonalds hamburgers, Starbucks coffee, and IKEA furniture are frequently identified as prototypical examples of this trend. Firms such as these are more than just benefactors of this trend: they are also facilitators of it. By offering the same basic product worldwide, they help to create a global market. A company does not have to be the size of these multinational giants to facilitate and benefit from the globalization of markets. In the United States, for example, nearly 90 percent of firms that export are small businesses employing less than 100 people, and their share of total US exports has grown steadily over the last decade to now exceed 20 percent. Firms with less than 500 employees accounted for 97 percent of all US exporters and almost 30 percent of all exports by value. Typical of these is Hytech, a New York based manufacturer of solar panels that generates 40 percent of its $3 million in annual sales from exports to five countries, or B&S Aircraft Alloys, another New York company whose exports account for 40 percent of its $8 million annual revenues. The situation is similar in several other nations. In Germany, for example, which is the worlds largest exporter, a staggering 98 percent of small and mid-sized companies have exposure to international markets, either via exports or international production.Despite the global prevalence of Citigroup credit cards, McDonalds hamburgers, Starbucks coffee, and IKEA stores, it is important not to push too far the view that national markets are giving way to the global market. As we shall see in later chapters, significant differences still exist among national markets along many relevant dimensions, including consumer tastes and preferences, distribution channels, culturally embedded value systems, business systems, and legal regulations. These differences frequently require companies to customize marketing strategies, product features, and operating practices to best match conditions in a particular country. The most global markets currently are not markets for consumer products-where national differences in tastes and preferences are still often important enough to act as a brake on globalization-but markets for industrial goods and materials that serve a universal need the world over. These include the markets for commodities such as aluminum, oil, and wheat. For industrial products such as microprocessors, DRAMs(computer memory chips), and commercial jet aircraft, for computer software, and for financial assets from US. Treasury bills to Eurobonds and futures and futures on the Nikkei index or the Mexican peso. In many global markets, the same firms frequently confront each other as competitors in nation after nation. Coca-Cocas rivalry with PepsiCo is a global one, as are the rivalries between General Motors and Toyota, Boeing and Airbus, Caterpillar and Komatsu in earthmoving equipment, and Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft in video games. If a film moves into a nation not currently serves by its rivals, many of those rivals are sure to follow to prevent their competitor from gaining an advantage. As firms follow each other around the world, they bring with them many of the assets that served them well in other national markets-including their products, operating strategies, marketing strategies, and brand names-creating some homogeneity across markets. Thus, greater uniformity replaces diversity. In an increasing number of industries, it is no longer meaningful to talk about the German market, the American market the Brazilian market, or the Japanese market, for many firms there is only the global market. THE GLOBALIZATION OF PRODUCTION The globalization of production refers to the sourcing of goods and services from locations around the globe to take advantage of national differences in the cost and quality of factors of production (such as labor, energy, land, and capital). By doing this, companies hope to lower their overall cost structure or improve the quality or functionality of their product offering, thereby allowing them to compete more effectively. Consider the Boeing 777, a commercial jet airliner. Eight Japanese suppliers make parts for the fuselage, doors and wings, a supplier in Singapore makes the doors for the nose landing gear, three suppliers in Italy manufacture wing flaps, and so on. In total, some 30 percent of the 777, by value, is built by foreign companies. For its most recent jet airliner, the 787 Boeing has pushed this trend even further, with some 65 percent of the total value of the aircraft scheduled to be outsourced to foreign companies, 35percent of which will go to three major Japanese companies. Part of Boeings rationale for outsourcing so much production to foreign suppliers is that these suppliers are the best in the world at their particular activity. A global web of suppliers yields a better final product, which enhances the chances of Boeing winning a greater share of total orders for aircraft than its global rival Airbus Industries. Boeing also outsources some production to foreign countries to increase the chance that it will win significant orders from airline based in that country. For another example of a global web of activities, consider again the example of Vizio given in the Opening Case. Vizio, an American company with just 75 employees, has become one of the largest sellers of flat panel TVs in the United States in just four years by coordinating a global web of activities, bringing together components manufactured in South Korea, China and the United States, arranging for their assembly in Mexico, and then selling them in the United States. Early outsourcing efforts were primarily confined to manufacturing activities, such as those undertaken by Boeing and Vizio, increasingly, however, companies are taking advantage of modern communications technology, particularly the Internet, to outsource service activities to low-cost producers in other nations. Many software companies, including IBM, now use Indian engineers to perform maintenance functions on software designed in the United States. The time difference allows Indian engineers to run debugging tests on software written in the United States when US engineers sleep, and the corrected code is transmitted back to the United States over secure Internet connections so it is ready for us engineers to work on the following day. Dispersing value-creation activities in this way can compress the time and lower the costs required to develop new software programs. Other companies, from computer makes to banks, are outsourcing customer service functions, such as customer call centers, to developing nations where labor is cheaper. Robert Reich, who served as secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, has argued that as a consequence of the trend exemplified by companies such as Boeing, IBM, and Vizio, in many cases it is becoming irrelevant to talk about American products, Japanese products, German products, or Korean products. Increasingly, according to Reich, outsourcing productive activities to different suppliers results in the creation of products that are glo