Volume 4, Issue 1

The past decade has witnessed an increasingly rapid tendency toward globalization in the world economy, and this has significantly affected the comparative advantage and international competitiveness of nations. This paper examines the effect of globalization on the comparative advantage and international competitiveness of Europe in manufactured goods as a whole, in high technology goods, and in office equipment and telecommunications during the past two decades. In particular, the paper evaluates the view that Europe is facing a serious double competitiveness squeeze – in high-technology goods from the United States and Japan and from the bottom in simpler manufactured goods from emerging developing countries, especially the Dynamic Asian Economies. This view is based on the over-regulation and rigid labor markets prevailing in most European countries. The paper shows, however, that this view is not generally correct.

This article will examine the dilemma which the European Union faces as it tries to reconcile expansion which is intrinsically Westernization under capitalism and democratization and the impact of US imposed globalization perceived as a potential loss of national and historic traditions and cultures. It will examine the equation of globalization and American acculturation, the EU anti-globalization movement's ambivalent positions against the WTO, multilateral organizations and EU multinationals and the rationale behind dialectics of anti-globalization at a time of EU enlargement.

The contemporary U.S. textile and apparel industry has faced significant challenges as the volume of imported goods entering the domestic market has continually increased. In attempts to both foster development in select world regions and maintain viability of the domestic industry, the U.S. government has negotiated a variety of trade agreements extending preferential treatment, including duty- and quota-free access to the U.S. market for apparel and other textile products manufactured in developing countries in the Caribbean Basin, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Andean region. In addition, provisions included in the agreement granting China, the world's largest producer of textiles and apparel, admission to the World Trade Organization have allowed this country to become an immediate beneficiary of the MFA quota phase-out. This article examines the current state of the domestic textile and apparel industry and provides an overview of trade agreements enacted during the past decade that are of specific interest within the textile and apparel sector. It offers insight into challenges and opportunities for both the domestic textile and apparel industries in an age of rapid globalization as final elimination of the existing quota system in 2005 approaches.

New technologies integrated New Zealand into the international economy after the 1960s. State investment in air services, international telecommunications, and container shipping enhanced access to overseas markets. They prepared the nation for the shock of Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community. Yet state-owned services were not responsive to demand and were often slow to lower the cost of conducting business between New Zealand and the outside world. This paper suggests that the deregulation and privatization of government-owned enterprises after 1984 quickly reduced the cost of distance, accelerating the globalization of New Zealand.

This paper evaluates the impact of China's WTO entry and the establishment of a free-trade agreement between China and ASEAN on the ASEAN-5 (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand). We examine the trade competition between the two regions using a market-share model and assess the impact of China's WTO entry on the ASEAN-5 with an exchange rate-tariff model, based on two-digit SITC data. It is found that for the period 1987 to 2000 the competition in trade only occurred between China and Singapore in manufacturing goods, while the competition between China and other four nations was in primary goods. The trade-widening opportunity between the two regions appears much larger than the competitive challenges for ASEAN-5 after the WTO entry of China and the establishment of FTA between ASEAN and China, impacts on different industries are evaluated.

The Hegelian dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis can provide a perspicacious framework for analyzing the evolutionary process of economic change as envisaged in many theories of growth and development from David Hume and David Ricardo to Joseph Schumpeter. An evolution of economic structure is a perpetual sequence of change with constant contradictions, self-transformation, and self-organization. The same dialectic is applied to the “flying-geese” paradigm of industrial upgrading (an emended version of Akamatsu’s original model) that explains Japan’s postwar process of structural transformation and upgrading, a process full of contradictory developments and incessant adjustments occurring at both the market (unconscious coordination) and the policy (conscious coordination) level.