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Globalization
Everyday you hear about globalization. It just seems that every single day our earth is becoming smaller and smaller. Global brands like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Starbucks are found everywhere. People all over the world are complaining that nations are losing power and independence. They claim that all important decisions are now taken at a supra-national level (this is specially true in the EU). But is it really true? Sometimes I wish it were. You see, I am Dutch but I was raised in Switzerland, attended college in France and Spain before getting my first job in Canada. I now happen to live in Mexico, but as many other things in life this is due to circumstances, and circumstances may change. That means that for me, as well as a growing group of people who have become used to live all around the world, the nation system doesn’t make much sense anymore. It simply places too many artificial barriers that make life ridiculously complex when it doesn’t need to be.
Despite all the talk about globalization, most of the changes that have happened over the last decades have mainly impacted corporations. At the individual level there are still many barriers protecting nations which make the life of people like myself difficult. I think that these barriers can easily be grouped in three kinds, commercial, financial and legal.
The commercial barriers are starting to crumble. It is becoming very difficult to limit the sale of a product to a single country or region or use differentiated pricing policies around the world. The gray market which quickly appears when artificial product availability and pricing is introduced by the manufacturer is taking care of the problem in most cases. However, there are still important issues impacting global consumers where I feel totally unprotected. One case is for example DVDs. The introduction of regions makes it impossible for me to buy a Spanish Blu-Ray disk because it will simply not play on my American PlayStation 3. The same happens with console games. Music is another sector that needs to be liberated. It doesn’t make any sense that I can easily buy a French CD from Amazon.fr but that I cannot buy from the French Apple Store. The problem is that I do not feel that anyone is fighting for the global consumer. We really need someone to pick that fight for us. These issues should be discussed at an international level, for example by the WTO.
On a financial level, I strongly believe that individuals deserve more freedom. We should be allowed to easily open a bank account anywhere in the world. Don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to avoid paying taxes, I just want to move my money where I can get the best returns. I would love to invest in the US through online brokerage companies like e-trade, but I can’t. It doesn’t matter if I have access to all the required information to find interesting investment opportunities. Because of all the legal barriers imposed to individuals, there is no way for me to invest in Serbia for example, now that they are moving closer to joining the EU. I would love to sell Euros and buy Dollars now that it is clear that the current exchange rate is taking a terrible toll on the European industry and that the ECB will have to lower rates, but that is not going to happen either because I cannot have an Euro denominated account in Mexico, despite being a customer of a global bank based in Europe. That drives me crazy. I do understand that if we liberalize the financial system this could be a great opportunity for drug lords and other evildoers to abuse the system, but I still believe that something needs to be done to help individuals take their financial decisions freely. Moving exclusively to electronic currency could be the solution to start eradicating crime and allow for more (supervised) financial freedom.
The legal front is the most complex and where more work is required. Taxation and retirement benefits for example are regulated by law and represent a major issue that countries have been trying to solve through bilateral agreements. However, if there is no such agreement in place you may be out of luck. Say for example that you worked 40 years in total, 20 in one country and 20 in a different country. You may qualify for retirement in any of those countries after working for 30 years, but if there is no agreement to recognize the years worked in the other country you may end up not qualifying for benefits in neither country. In general laws are still designed to protect citizens who live and die in their home country. This simply does no longer represent the current situation of an increasingly large population group and inadecuate laws are reducing worker mobility. If countries are serious about attracting talent they must make sure that situations like the one I described are avoided.
The problem is in many ways cultural, people are not used to this new situation. Most people still expect your nationality to describe you. However, those traveling to France will be very disappointed if they expect to only see white people wearing bérets and carrying baguettes under their arms on the streets of Paris. The world has changed. You would expect large Internet companies like Yahoo or Google to understand the problem, after all their reach is global, right? Wrong. They still assume too often that because someone connects from a certain country they are citizens of that country and that they behave in a predictable way. For example, when I connect to the US Yahoo main page from Mexico I get an ad for the Mexican soccer section (I couldn’t care less for Mexican soccer). When I connect to Google from Brazil, I get my search results in Portuguese. When I try to see the goals scored by Real Madrid on marca.com, I am denied service because I am connecting from outside of Spain. All this is simply ridiculous. Of course, I have the option to fight back, I can use a proxy server in the US or in any other country to fool the system, but why should I have to? This happens to some degree even in the US. That is why a device like the slingbox has become popular. People want to see their home team games while on travel. Consumers demand freedom and they will ultimately get it, even if they have to bend the rules.
I do not expect changes to happen quickly. Politicians do not have any incentive to help people like me. For starters, we do not live in our home country and too often we do not vote or represent a political force. Besides, the issue is complex and international cooperation is needed to solve the many problems that I have briefly outlined. As usual, governments are playing catch-up with the social issues that are grappling the world. Globalization is happening and not just at the corporate level. Governments need to adjust to a new reality and they need to do so very quickly because the amount of people who are becoming global citizens is growing exponentially and we are increasingly asking for solutions to our new problems. However, this issue needs also to be tackled by corporations who need to work with a new kind of customers who expect truly global service from global companies.