Globalization: Myth and Reality

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Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green Carmichael. Back in the 1980s, General Electric earned 80% of its revenue within the United States. Today, GE earns more than 70% outside of the U.S. cEO Jeff Immelt first joined GE in 1982, and he witnessed the company's transformation due to globalization. It's also why he surprised so many people by announcing a shift in GE strategy to one of localization.

And in the face of a protection environment, companies are going to have to navigate the world on their own. It's going to be about localization. Sustainable growth in the future is going to require local capability inside a global footprint.

IMelt's announcement came in a speech last year to graduates of the NYU Stern School of Business, and it immediately got attention.

Big companies are distrusted, Governments and global institutions are failing to address the world's challenges, and globalization is being attacked like never before. And it's not just true in the United States, but everywhere.

Imelt is hardly the only CEO grappling with these changing attitudes. And watching his speech was NYU and ESE professor Pankaj Gamehawat, an expert on globalization. He agrees that around the world, yes, many people are looking for ways to press the undo button on globalization. But he warns that may not be realistic or even desirable. He joins me now to talk about the state of globalization and where it's heading next. Hunkage, thanks so much for coming on the HBR IdeaCast.

Delighted to be with you.

So I just have to ask. We're sitting here in the studio. You have the most amazing cufflinks on. They're little globes that actually spin. Tell me about those.

Well, since men have fewer choices in terms of accessories than women tend to, I tend to focus on cufflinks. So I actually have a whole set of global cufflinks as a way of reminding myself what it is that I work on. So there are these globes that spin. I have a not entirely symmetric pair where one cufflink has the western hemisphere and the other cufflink has the eastern hemisphere. I have, based on the title of my World 3.0 book, a pair in which one says world and the other says 3.0. And so this just happens to be a little hobby of mine.

This is so great. Do they also come from all around the world?

The cufflinks are in fact, diverse in their national origins. So they truly are globalized. Just as a way of using one of my few degrees of freedom in terms of how I dress myself to signal my interest in this phenomenon, which really does absorb me.

That's so fun. There is a sense that globalization has been this inevitable force sort of moving forward, that it is this juggernaut that is changing, changing the way we've all done business. So how globalized is the world?

Actually, globalization is one of those things that we think we know so much about from our daily lives that we usually don't feel the need to either start with the data or return to the data for validation. So I've been spending a fair amount of my time just compiling simple metrics of globalization. So I ask people, for instance, questions like, of all the phone calls in the world, of all the phone calling minutes, what percentage last year were accounted for by international phone calls? Turns out the answer is about 3%. If we focus on plain old telephone service, actually somewhat lower. And if we add in Skype calls, it gets perhaps close to 5%, no higher. Or I ask people questions like foreign direct investment. What percentage of all the investment going on in the world last year was accounted for by cross border investment? Turns out the answer was less than 10%. So these numbers are way lower than most people expect. And so this is a phenomenon that I refer to very neutrally as global oni.

What about something like international news consumption or the Internet? Because we're told, right, that the Internet is this great democratizing force and information flows through freely around the world. So is that any higher?

Well, it's a bit higher, but again, less than you might think. I think the latest estimate, say, off Facebook, is that less than 10% of people's friends on Facebook live in countries other than where those people themselves are based. And that's actually, in some sense, while it's higher than the phone call number, is more interesting because international phone calls are depressed by the fact that the phone companies charges so much for phone calls. Whereas on Facebook, in principle, you could friend somebody halfway around the world just as easily as somebody next door. And so I suggest that there's a huge difference between connectivity or the potential for connectedness and actual levels of connectedness. And the actual levels are way lower than the technological constraints might lead us to expect.

So if money and information aren't flowing across borders as much, what about products? What about trade?

Well, trade is certainly more globalized than the examples I just mentioned, at least on the merchandise side. So when I Look at the World Trade Organization's estimates of trade as a percentage of gdp. The estimates depend on whether you correct for multi country supply chains or not. So for instance, if an iPhone is shipped from China to the US it actually embodies a lot of components made in other parts of East Asia. Those components are usually counted more than once in the official trade statistics. So South Korean company ships a component to China, that component gets counted once there. Then when the assembled iPhone is shipped to the US that component effectively ends up getting counted again. When we correct for that, the number is more like 20% of GDP. 20% is accounted for by trade after you adjust for double counting and triple counting.

Is it big countries like China and the US that are doing most of the importing and exporting, or is it other countries?

Well, it depends on whether you're looking at absolute volumes of trade or whether you're looking at how intensely a country is engaged in trade in terms of absolute volumes. Well, we know that China is roughly a thousand times the size of Mongolia. So China is obviously going to have typically way more trade with a third country than Mongolia would. However, when we account for the fact that China is a large economy and try looking at things like what percentage of the Chinese economy is focused on exports or what percentage of the US GDP is accounted for by imports, what you see is that both of these very large countries actually rank in the bottom 10% of the countries that we look at in the DHL Global Connectedness Index that I prepare every two years.

If globalization is mostly a bunch of global ONI, you know, we think that we're more connected than we are, and if especially the United States isn't actually doing that much trade with other countries, why do we see this sort of huge backlash against globalization if it's actually not that big a trend in some ways?

Well, I think an important part of the backlash against globalization has to do with exaggerated conceptions of how much stuff crosses borders. And given the recent focus on immigration, maybe it's helpful to think about people flows, which in addition to trade flows, capital flows and information flows, are the fourth pillar of our global connectedness index. So when you look at first generation immigrants, people born in another country who've chosen to live in the US as a percentage of the total US population, the number turns out to be about 14%. When you look at people's estimates of the percentage of first generation immigrants in relation to total population, the three surveys I looked at most recently serve up estimates ranging from 32 to 42%.

So that's more than twice the actual number.

More than twice up to three times. And then the one thing I would add is that when you actually tell people about the 14% number, that apparently cuts in half the people who think that there are too many immigrants in the US So it doesn't solve all the tensions around immigration, but it certainly helps alleviate them.

What about jobs? Because that's something that's come up a lot in the United States and I think in Britain with the Brexit vote. Is that something you've looked at?

Yeah. And my general conclusion about the jobs situation is that there's misdirection going on here for different types of reasons and with different mechanisms at work. The general estimate is that technology causes way more job losses than anything having to do with globalization. Second, you have to wonder why, with the US Closed to full employment, at least by some measures, why the loss of jobs is such a concern. I certainly understand people's concerns about trade depressing wages, but the availability of jobs in the US is a little bit less of an issue than, say, in Spain, where I spend half the year, where the joblessness rate actually is quite high. And I think that the misdirection is in terms of ignoring the role of technology and also blaming immigrants in some sense for a range of social ills. So that in Britain, I've heard people suggest that the real problem is not too many people coming in and taking jobs away from the locals. The real factor is the failure of the British government since the time of Margaret Thatcher's privatizations to invest in public infrastructure. And as a result, when the waits get long at the National Health Service, when it takes a long time to get a flat, when it's hard to get your kid into school, the obvious target consists of people who look unlike yourself and say, if it weren't for these people, my situation would be much better.

Maybe at this point, this question is a little bit overdue, but is globalization a good thing?

Yes. Okay.

Like, why?

Well, I think, first of all, we've already talked about some of the reasons that people hate globalization. One is that they tend to overestimate it. Second, under the assumption that it's all pervasive, anything that goes wrong gets blamed on globalization. But that's just an argument about the costs are not as big as you think, and it's worth reminding ourselves of what the benefits are. And here I could cite economic models, but an example of how costly it can be to move from a globalized situation to a de. Globalized situation. Is provided by the example of this textile designer in Philadelphia who decided she didn't like the fact that so much of the clothing in the US was imported. And so she decided to make a suit out of materials and buttons and so forth, all available within 100 miles of Philadelphia. Six months later, after 500 hours of work by 20 skilled artisans, she came up with a suit of sorts. And by sorts I mean, okay, first of all, it didn't have sleeves, so it doesn't perform all the functions that you would like a suit to perform. Second, despite the six month time that it took to make the suit, she still had to get 8% of the inputs from more than 100 miles away. And this is a relatively, in some sense, simple industry. So if you think of trying to de globalize something like say, consumer electronics, where the supply chains have totally disappeared from the US and where scale economies matter, you start to get a sense that restarting subscale production without the right supply chain in the US would actually be far more costly in terms of the additional costs imposed than the suit example would suggest. So I like to show my students a picture of the suit and ask them if, even if they strongly believe that jobs should stay where local demand is concentrated, would they really want to wear a suit like that?

So does this point perhaps a way forward for some people to start defending globalization? Because no one really seems to win any votes for from the public defending globalization.

Part of it is pointing out that the costs are lower than people think, and part of it is pointing out that the benefits are greater than people think. When you think broadly about the gains from globalization, they're typically an order of magnitude or higher than the very narrow trade models tend to indicate. Gains of a couple of percentage points of gdp. Those are large numbers. We're starting to talk potentially thousand, two thousand, maybe $3,000 per American. That's a large number.

That is a large number. And yet I'm thinking back to a study that you cited, I think in one of your articles for HBR.org that showed if there's a trade policy that creates 1,000 jobs outside the US and costs one American job, people basically oppose it. And then the flip side, if there's a trade policy that by contrast costs another country a thousand jobs, but creates a single American job, people are in favor of it.

To have a thousand to one preference for domestic jobs over foreign jobs is very, very different from the idealized world imagined by economists where anything that increases global welfare is pursued and then just some redistribution happens that makes Whoever lost their job or whatever better off than before. I think first of all, there's a lot of evidence indicating that the more you know about foreign countries, the less likely you are to treat them with the kind of discount that that thousand to one comparison we just talked about implies. There is a stunning correlation between how well connected countries are in terms of cross border information flows and the extent to which the locals agree with the statement that our culture is superior to everybody else's. So at one extreme you have the chill Scandinavian countries which are very well connected informationally with the rest of the world according to our DHL Global Connectedness Index, and where only 24% of Swedes think that their culture is better than everybody else's. At the other extreme, I'm sad to say we have my native India, which ranks very low on informational connectivity and where 90% of people agree with the statement our culture is superior to everybody else's. Even more Paradoxically, more than 90% of the Indian respondents agree that local culture needs protection. So it's an interesting pairing. Our culture is superior, but also particularly in need of protection. And it's hard to see how that contributes by itself to advancing globalization or improving how globalization is perceived as opposed to demonizing it.

If trade does slow down, who's going to be hurt the most by that?

Well, interesting study suggesting that most of the gains from trade are concentrated in the lower income deciles of the US population. And if that seems hard to believe, think of Walmart, which is the largest single importer, I believe, into this country of products from China. It's not really the top 10% of the income distribution that goes to shop at Walmart. And so the estimates are that while everybody's goods and services are cheaper with trade than without trade, in terms of the percentage gains, they're significantly greater at the lower end of the income distribution than at the upper end. Which is one of the reasons why I find some of the populist anger against globalization a little bit not only misplaced, but self defeating. As in likely to significantly worsen the fortunes of the people who are most opposed to globalization.

Right. So what does this world we find ourselves in now mean for companies? We've talked a little bit about what it means for people, but what about companies?

The world looks significantly more complicated from the standpoint of a company trying to run cross border operations than it used to. You have to worry about a range of different things that weren't quite as apparent in the days when everything seemed like smooth sailing and lots of people were convinced that soon the world would be just one giant country, which is not a delusion that is quite as widely shared at this point in our history. So companies have to think even harder. They always had to think about this. But some of them deluded themselves that the borders were going away about how you operate in a world where differences across countries are significant, where borders are not entirely permeable, and where access to markets is to some extent contingent on popular opinions about globalization, with the popular opinions, at least in many advanced economies, becoming quite negative. And so what I would argue, though, is that this is the kind of environment in which managers and researchers such as myself, who seek to provide advice to managers, have to spend more rather than less time thinking about globalization and how to run a global company than in what in retrospect seem like the good old days when it looked like borders were going to disappear and distance wouldn't matter at all.

Are we heading more towards a more multipolar world or a bipolar world? Is there going to be a new sheriff in town? How do you see this all playing out?

In some sense, the post war moment, which was the moment when the US had the maximum share world GDP close to 40%, was an unusual moment in the sense that Europe's productive capacity had been destroyed by World War II, as had Japan's. And so the whole thing was unsustainable. There's no going back to the period like the 1950s, when the US with x percent, where x is less than 5 of the world's population, accounted for 40% of the world's GDP. So this was inevitable, not because something went wrong in the US but because other countries rebuilt their productive capacity and started to move forward in terms of whether there's a new sheriff in town. Well, first of all, it's not clear whether the old sheriff fully recognizes that it's no longer the old sheriff. But if you look at the arithmetic, it's a little bit hard to think of any country playing the kind of role that Britain did quantitatively at the beginning of the 20th century in driving exports that the US did after the end of World War II, or that China did in the 1990s up through the financial crisis. I'm originally from India, so I take a particular interest in some of the opinions that get floated there. And this notion of India replacing China as the world's new driver of trade growth. India would have, I calculated last year to grow at 10% for 10 years plus in order to achieve the kind of status that China had in the world economy back in 2005, it's not happening. Like it or not, we are going to have more of a multipolar world where it's not one hegemonic power that's dictating things, or even one country that's really the key driver of export growth. To the extent that there is trade growth, it's going to be spread around more than it was at some of those other moments where there was a clear global champion.

Do you think globalization will slow down, even go into reverse, go to zero? What do you see happening?

We've clearly seen a slowdown already. In fact, the DHL Global Connectedness Index that I release every two years indicates that what happened after the financial crisis was a huge drop off in trade and capital flows across borders and that we finally, in 2014, 2015, just got back to the levels of globalization that we had before the financial crisis. So to those who argue that globalization cannot go into reverse, well, it already did. So it's worth going back and looking at the data. I think the dangerous thing though is I think a lot of people are confusing the pause button or the rewind button with the off button. And so when I read these discussions of is it the death of globalization? Well, it is very, very hard to imagine a scenario in which globalization shrinks to such a point that it becomes irrelevant. To take an example, the U.S. as I mentioned, is not particularly intensive in the extent to which it trades with the rest of the world. So if I remember correctly, imports and exports average 13 or 14% of US GDP. When Moody analytics tries modeling the effects of a trade war with Mexico and China accompanied by a stronger dollar, they're predicting a 5% decrease in U.S. trade levels. Not 5 percentage points, but 5% of that 14% number. So might go from 14% to 13%. Does that mean that we can forget about it? I think most reasonable people would agree no.

What is a trade war exactly? And how does it work? And when was the last time that we had one?

Well, there have been many, many trade wars in history because countries do do things that are not in their own interest. And the human history would be a lot simpler if that weren't the case. But the one that I go back to for reference purposes in terms of how bad things could get is the one truly global trade war with really global consequences that we saw, which is back in the 1930s when the volume of global trade dropped by 2/3. Nobody is predicting, even with a trade war, a 2/3 drop off. As I mentioned, Moody's is working off a 5% number. The Peterson Institute of International Economics has a trade war scenario that indicates a 5% drop off. But even if the drop off were larger, suppose for the sake of argument that we actually did have a 2/3 drop off in world trade now, as happened in the 1930s, we would still have, thanks to the growth of trade and FDI from levels that were minuscule back then to levels that are noticeable and significantly higher but far from complete now with a 2/3 haircut, we would still end up with a higher level of trade intensity than at the pre war peak. And given that people at the pre war peak were saying, ah, the world is completely globalized and it's a key phenomenon to focus on, I cannot imagine a scenario in which globalization shrinks so much that it becomes a negligible factor in economics.

So there are many myths about globalization that you have punctured in your career of writing about this. If there was one biggest one that you wish people would just forget and walk away from, what is that despite.

The times we live in, probably the single biggest delusion is still that somehow technology is going to make the world one soon, no matter what else happens. This is a staple of the discussion about globalization. So if you go Back to the 1850s, David Livingston was talking about the railroad, the steamship and the telegraph integrating East Africa perfectly with the rest of the world. And you look at that and you think, what a visionary, because 160 years later, East Africa still has appalling levels of connectedness with the rest of the world. And so I think what's old is this tendency to sort of invoke the technology du jour as the silver bullet that finally is going to dissolve borders, kill distance, et cetera. And I think it's useful to go back and look at history in order to form an assessment of how credible some of the current claims are.

Well, Pankaj, this has been so interesting. Thank you for coming and talking to us today.

Sarah, thanks so much for such an interesting set of questions. Thank you.

That's Pankaj Gamawat. He runs the center for Globalization of Education and Management at the NYU Stern School of Business and is a professor of Global Strategy at IESA Business School in Spain. His latest book is the Laws of Globalization. For more from pankaj, go to hbr.org I especially like his article titled People Are Angry about Globalization. Here's what to Do About It. Sarah I'm Sarah Green Carmichael. Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast.