Idea: Globalisation - United Kingdom

The freer movement of goods, services, ideas and people around the world

Globalisation is the more or less simultaneous marketing and sale of identical goods and services around the world. So widespread has the phenomenon become over the past two decades that no one is surprised any more to find Coca-Cola in rural Vietnam, Accenture in Tashkent and Nike shoes in Nigeria. The statistic that perhaps best reflects the growth of globalisation is the value of cross-border world trade expressed as a percentage of total global GDP: it was around 15% in 1990, is some 20% today and is expected by McKinsey & Company, a consulting firm, to rise to 30% by 2015.

Use of the word in this business context is alleged to go back at least as far as 1944, but its first very visible appearance was in the writings of Theodore Levitt (see article), a professor of marketing whose article published by Harvard Business Review in 1983 was entitled “The Globalisation of Markets”. In it he foresaw “the emergence of global markets for standardised products on a previously unimagined scale of magnitude”. ...