international phone call is rapidly plummeting toward just a few cents per minute.
The Internet and World Wide Web
The rapid growth of the World Wide Web is the latest expression of this development. In 1990, fewer than 1 million users were connected to the Internet. By 1995, the figure had risen to 50 million. By 2006, the Internet had 747 million users. The WWW has developed into the information backbone of the global economy. In the U.S. alone, some $250 billion of goods and services are expected to be sold online to retail customers in 2007, up from almost nothing in 1997. Viewed globally, the Web is emerging as an equalizer. It rolls back some of the constraints of location scale, and time zones. The Web makes it much easier for buyers and sellers to find each other, wherever they may be located global presence at a lower cost than ever before.
Transportation technology
In addition to developments in communication technology, several major innovations in transportation technology have occurred since World War Ⅱ. In economic terms, the most important are probably the development of commercial jet aircraft
and super freighters and introduction of containerization, which simplifies transshipment from one mode of transport to another. The advent of commercial jet travel, by reducing the time needed to get from one location to another, has effectively shrunk the globe. In terms of travel time, New York is now “closer” to Tokyo than it was to Philadelphia in the Colonial days.
Containerization has revolutionized the transportation business, significantly lowering the cost of shipping goods over long distances. Before the advent of containerization, moving goods from one mode of transport to another was vary labor intensive, lengthy, and costly. It could take days and several hundred longshoremen to unload a ship and reload goods onto trucks and trains. With the advent of widespread containerization in the 1970s and 1980s, the whole process can now be executed by a handful of longshoremen in a couple of days. Since 1980, the world’s containership fleet has more than quadrupled, reflecting in part the growing volume of international trade and in part the switch to this mode of transportation. As a result of the efficiency gains associated with containerization, transportation costs have plummeted, making it much more economical to ship goods around the globe, thereby helping to drive the globalization of markets and productions. Between 1920 and 1990, the average ocean freight
and port charges per ton of U.S. export and import cargo fell from $95 to $29(in 1990 dollar). The cost of shipping freight per ton-mile on railroads in the United State fell from 3.04 cents in 1985 to 2.3 cents in 2000, largely as a result of efficiency gains from the widespread use of containers. An increased share of cargo now goes by air. Between 1955 and 1999, average air transportation revenue per ton-kilometer fell by more than 80 percent. Reflecting the falling cost of airfreight, by the early 2000s air shipments accounted for 28 percent of the value of U.S. trade, up from 7 percent in 1965.
Implications for the Globalization of Production
As transportation costs associated with the globalization of production declined, dispersal of production to geographically separate locations become more economical. As a result of the technological innovations discussed above, the real costs of information processing and communication have fallen dramatically in the past two decades. These developments make it possible for a firm to create and then manage a globally dispersed production system, further facilitating the globalization of production. A worldwide communications network has become essential for many international businesses. For example, Dell uses the Internet to
coordinate and control a globally dispersed production system to such an extent that it holds only three days’ worth of inventory at its assembly location. Dell’s Internet-based system records orders for computer equipment as they are submitted by customers via the company’s Web site, then immediately transmits the resulting orders for components to various suppliers around the world, which have a real-time look at Dell’s order flow and can adjust their production schedules accordingly. Given the low cost of airfreight, Dell can use air transportation to speed up the delivery of critical components to meet unanticipated demand shifts without delaying the shipment of final product to customers. Dell also has used modern communications technology to outsource its customer service operations to India. When U.S. customers call Dell with a service inquiry, they are routed to Bangalore in India, where English-speaking service personnel handle the call.
The Internet has been a major force facilitating international trade in services. It is the Web that allows hospitals in Chicago to send MRI scans to India for analysis, accounting offices in San Francisco to outsource routine tax preparation work to accountants living in the Philippines, and software testers in India to debug code written by developers in Redmond, Washington, the headquarters of Microsoft. We are probably still in the early stages of this
development. As Moore’s Law continues to advance and telecommunications bandwidth continues to increase, almost any work processes that can be digitalized will be, and this will allow that work to be performed wherever in the world it is most efficient and effective to do so.
The development of commercial jet aircraft has also helped knit together the worldwide operations of many international businesses. Using jet travel, an American manager need spend a day at most traveling to his or her firm’s Europe or Asian operations. This enables the manager to oversee a globally dispersed production system.
Implications for the Globalization of Markets
In addition to the globalization of production, technological innovations have also facilitated the globalization of markets. Low-cost global communications network such as the World Wide Web are helping to create electronic global marketplaces. As noted above, low-cost transportation has made shipping products around the world more economical, thereby helping to create global markets. For example, due to the tumbling costs of shipping goods by air, roses grown in Ecuador can be sold in New York two days later while they still fresh. This has given rise to an industry in