Is the World Really Flat?
Is the world really flat?
In his famous book: The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman depicts how globalization has broken the restrictions of country border and is transforming the world into an interconnected, flat world. Based on his observations, Friedman groups these globalization phenomena into 10 so-called “flatteners”, such as Collapse of the Berlin Wall, outsourcing, offshoring, and informing. He is a firm advocate of free trade. He recounts several examples of Chinese and India companies that take advantage of low cost labor to integrate into the whole world trade supply chain. From his view, the world is really becoming a seamless world factory where every country works in cooperation along this supply chain. Meanwhile, globalization is bringing a set of globalized values to every corner of the world. Indeed, the world seems like a truly fair playing ground.
However, in my view, the world is just far from being flat.
The world is in a huge imbalance. Due to the comparative advantage of labor between developing countries and developed countries, the world capital is flowing from the US and European countries which have high labor cost to emerging economies like China and India where there are abundant supply of cheap and skilled labor. On one hand, China and the other emerging economies are accelerating their integration into the interdependence world factory. Gaps in living standards, wage and technology are quickly shrinking. The benefits of economic boom are spreading from those advanced economies to emerging economies. On the other hand, this economic model results in huge trade imbalance and further solidifies the dominance of the developed economies on the upper end of the value chain. To sustain the high annual growth rate, China has to rely on its export-oriented economic model, which caused huge trade surplus and over-supply of currency. Such reliance on export means that China is competing in the lower end of the global value chain, mainly providing processing and assembly work for the global trade. Take iPhone as an example, an iPhone can sell at USD 600 in the US market. Among this USD600,