Thriving locally in the global economy

More and more small and midsize companies are joining corporate giants in striving to exploit international growth markets. At the same time, civic leaders worry about their communities' economic future in light of the impact of global forces on the operation and survival of business. How can communities retain local vitality yet still link their business to the global economy? Harvard professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter addresses that question in this classic HBR article, orginally published in 1995. To avoid a clash between international economic interests and local political interests, globalizing business must learn how to be responsive to the communities in which they operate, Kanter says. And communities must determine how to create a civic culture that will attract and retain footloose companies. The author surveyed five U.S. regions with direct connections to the global economy--Boston, Cleveland, Miami, Seattle, and the Spartanburg-Greenville region of South Carolina--to determine their business and civic leader's strategies for improving their constituent's quality of life. She identified ways in which the global economy can work locally by capitalizing on the resources that distinguish one place from another. Kanter argues that regions can invest in capabilities that connect their local populations to the global economy in one of three ways: as thinkers, makers, or traders. She points to the Spartanburg-Greenville region as a good example of a world-class makers, with its exceptional blue-collar workforce that has attracted more than 200 companies from 18 countries. The history of the economic development of this region is a lesson for those seeking to understand how to achieve world-class status and bring local residents into the world economy.     

Abraham Lincoln and the global economy

Abraham Lincoln would have well understood the challenges facing many modern emerging nations. In Lincoln's America, as in many developing nations today, sweeping economic change threatened older industries, traditional ways of living, and social and national cohesion by exposing economies and societies to new and powerful competitive forces. Yet even in the midst of the brutal and expensive American Civil war--and in part because of it--Lincoln and the Republican Congress enacted bold legislation that helped create a huge national market, a strong and unified economy governed by national institutions, and a rising middle class of businessmen and property owners. Figuring out how to maximize the benefits of globalization while minimizing its disruptions is a formidable challenge for policy makers. How do you expand opportunities for the talented and the lucky while making sure the rest of society doesn't fall behind? It may be helpful to look at the principles that informed the policies that Lincoln and the Republican Congress instituted after they came to power in 1861: Facilitate the upward mobility of low- and middle-income groups to give them a significant stake in the country. Emphasize the good of the national economy over regional interests. Affirm the need for sound government institutions to temper the dynamics of the free enterprise system. Tailor policies to the national situation. Realize that a period of turmoil may present a unique opportunity for reform. These principles drove the reforms that helped Americans cope with and benefit from rapid technological advances and the fast integration of the American economy in the nineteenth century. They may be instructive to today's policy makers who are struggling to help their own citizens integrate into the fast-changing global economy of the twenty-first century.     

Regional motors of the global economy

The thesis of this article is that world capitalism is moving into a phase of development marked by an intensified regionalization of production overlaid by—and rooted in—a global division of labour. In this process, a significant reallocation of economic coordination and steering functions is occurring, away from the sovereign state, up to the international and down to the regional levels. The historical development of the global capitalist system over the post-World-War-II years is reviewed. The mechanism underlying the growth and spread of large agglomerations of productive activity throughout the world are then elucidated. The combined processes of global integration and regional concentration of economic activity raise important questions about appropriate forms of regulation in the new world order, and some evolving tendencies are described. The article ends on a speculative note in which the possible emergence of something like a worldwide system of city-states at the dawn of the 21st century is contemplated.     

A paradoxical future for safety in the global knowledge economy

Governments face increasingly acute dilemmas in securing the safety of their citizens in the face of controversial technological innovations. This state of crisis results from structural features of the globalising knowledge economy, and the contradictory roles of governments, acting both as promoters of global business enterprise and also as regulators on behalf of a sophisticated and suspicious public. I explain the crisis by substituting ‘safety’ for ‘risk’ as the operative concept, and also using paradox as an explanatory tool. I produce a closed-cycle paradox, analogous to the classic Catch-22, to exhibit the contradictions in the situation. I discuss ways of resolving these, which include the recognition of policy-critical ignorance and the adoption of the perspective of post-normal science.     

China''s economic reforms and the global economy

This article, written prior to the imposition of martial law in China in June 1989, considers major trends in the globalization process, describes the nature of China's decade-long economic reform, and concludes by identifying three main characteristics of the future Chinese economy and its role in the global system.     

全球经济进入新转折时代

欧洲央行行长特里谢表示：“虽然有初步迹象表明经济下滑速度正在减缓，但我们仍需保持警惕。”     

Resources, innovation and growth in the global economy

The relative performance of open economies is analyzed in an endogenous growth model with asymmetric trade. A resource-rich country trades resource-based intermediates for final goods produced by a resource-poor economy. The effects of an increase in the resource endowment depend on the elasticity of substitution between resources and labor in intermediates' production. Under substitution (complementarity), the resource boom generates higher (lower) income, lower (higher) employment in the primary sector and faster (slower) growth in the resource-rich economy. In the resource-poor economy, the shock induces a higher (lower) relative wage and positive (negative) growth effects that are exclusively due to trade.     

全球经济确定性和不确定性

全球经济在低位运行 2017年全球经济依然在低位运行,自2008年全球金融危机以后,除了2010年经济有一个非常强烈的反弹,以后经济增长速度缓缓地往下走,2016年全球经济增长速度是3.1%,这是非常低的速度,是从来没有发生过的事情,因为以往危机以后经济会反弹,反弹以后会下跌,再次反弹然后持续增长.过去的三年里,无数的机构预测经济会强烈地反弹直至强烈的增长,但并没有发生.     

Risk management in the global economy: A review essay

This paper provides a review of developments in the area of risk management at both the firm level and the macro-economy. We review rationales regarding why firms choose to manage risk, as well as new developments in measuring and managing risk in a dynamic setting. We also consider current risk sharing arrangements in light of the theory regarding optimal risk sharing. The paper concludes with some suggestions for additional research that emphasizes the importance of incorporating market incompleteness in an equilibrium setting. We also discuss the role of incompleteness at the macro-level and speculate on how derivatives markets may influence macro-economic stabilization policy.     

Private equity in the global economy: Evidence on industry spillovers

Using a novel dataset on global private equity investments in 19 industries across 52 countries, we find that labor productivity, employment, profitability, and capital expenditures increase for publicly-listed companies in the same country and industry as private equity investments. Our results show that positive externalities created by private equity firms are absorbed by other companies within the same industry. Consistent with prior literature on competitive spillovers, these effects are more pronounced in country-industries with higher levels of competition, stronger institutions, and moderate levels of technological development suggesting that the competitive pressures from private equity-backed firms cause industry peers to react.     

Knowledge, skill, and education in the new global economy

This paper deals with three main topics. The first is the nature of post-industrial, service-based economies in which human capital has special importance. In the new global economy, sharp distinctions between services and goods become more difficult to draw, as exemplified by computer software, perhaps the purest embodiment so far of a knowledge-based industry in which human and organizational capital account for nearly all value added. Where does this intangible capital come from? That is the subject of the second section of the paper, which discusses the meanings attached to knowledge, skill and other components of human capital, sketching out a view emphasizing tacit know-how and the lessons of experience. This sets the stage for a third section outlining a number of implications for higher education.     

Soft commodities and the global financial crisis: Implications for the economy,resources and institutions

Over the past decade, soft commodities have been subjected to increasing speculative price fluctuations. Following the 2008 financial crisis, most studies have highlighted causal relationships between price volatility, derivative and future markets for underlying financial assets as well as agricultural and mineral commodities. This article investigates the multifaceted effects of unrestrained financialization of the resources and goods markets and its implications for agricultural markets and soft commodities for purposes other than direct human consumption. We place a particular emphasis on the process of commodification of food and non-food crops and their use as green source of liquid fuels (i.e. soy, sugar cane, palm oil, jatropha, and canola). It is argued that speculation in financial markets has led to spillover effects across commodity and resource markets. More importantly, speculation and price volatility in the commodity markets has had a direct bearing on the resource markets and organization and appropriation of common-pool resources. The article sheds further light on the causal relationship between derivative markets, hedging techniques, financial yields and price volatility and spillover effects in the market for food and soft commodities.     

Driving forces and barriers to a sustainable global economy

The major drivers of globalness are presented here from the perspective of the global economy as an emerging macrosystem. Key driving forces include not only technology, but also ideas and events. Special attention is given to ideas that have created more globalness in recent years and those that may be powerful in the future, and on possible macroevents that could act positively or negatively. Finally some barriers to further globalness are discussed.     

世界经济复苏缓慢中国需改革创新谋出路

今后的改革重点就是要将政府作为改革的对象,要转变全能型政府为服务型政府     

Thousands of models,one story: Current account imbalances in the global economy

The global financial crisis has led to a revival of the empirical literature on current account imbalances. This paper contributes to that literature by investigating the importance of evaluating model and parameter uncertainty prior to reaching any firm conclusion. We explore three alternative econometric strategies: examining all models, selecting a few, and combining them all. Out of thousands (or indeed millions) of models a story emerges. The chance that current accounts were aligned with fundamentals prior to the financial crisis appears to be minimal.     

次贷危机下的美国经济走势及其对全球经济的影响

从指标趋势看,引发此次次贷危机的美国房地产市场调整仍未结束,美信贷紧缩状况的持续对房地产市场和整体经济的复苏构成压力,巨额资金的救市措施从短期看更在于提振信心,从长期看其效果有待观察。全球经济亦将受到美经济衰退的拖累,但与其他经济体相比,美国经济仍显得更有弹性。     

世行将2009年中国GDP增长预测下调至6.5％

世界银行发布的最新《中国经济季报》认为，尽管受到全球经济危机的的严重冲击，中国的实体经济仍保持平稳较快的发展。     

Limits to the economy of knowledge and knowledge of the economy

In this essay, we explore the view that the growth of knowledge is a complex evolutionary process. We pay particular attention to the division of knowing in a knowledge economy, to the restless nature of knowledge and to the principle of variation and selection that makes the growth of knowledge an evolutionary phenomenon. The foundations for this discussion are located in Adam Smith's suggestion that the most fundamental aspect of the division of labour is the division of knowledge, and the consequential existence of roundabout and combinatorial ways of producing knowledge. This notion of roundaboutness also connects our discussion with the writings of the Austrian school of economists. It is this school of thought that has come closest to understanding the open-ended and evolutionary nature of knowledge based economic activity. The theory of complex adaptive systems, when applied to the economic and social domain, has enabled us to confront the distinction between knowledge and the institution of social understanding. We map the difference between knowledge, which is private, and understanding, which is social. If knowledge is a characteristic of individuals, understanding then becomes an emergent phenomenon arising from the interaction between individuals in specific contexts. Understanding has boundaries it has components that possess great heterogeneity and is sustained by the connections of information flow. It is a socially distributed process whose growth is dependent on a systemic context, on the way a given set of individuals interact to share information and thus to further develop their idiosyncratic knowledge. Recognising that understanding is necessarily distributed leads to the insight that economic activity, which is necessarily social, depends on shared understandings, that is to say, correlated knowledge. This provides a clue as to the unpredictability and unevenness of knowledge accumulation, and of course the unpredictability of capitalism as a knowledge driven system.