What Is Globalisation 全球化

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Jul 20th 2009
From Economist.com

Globalisation is the more or less simultaneous marketing and sale of identical goods and services around the world. So widespread has the phenomenon become over the past two decades that no one is surprised any more to find Coca-Cola in rural Vietnam, Accenture in Tashkent and Nike shoes in Nigeria. The statistic that perhaps best reflects the growth of globalisation is the value of cross-border world trade expressed as a percentage of total global GDP: it was around 15% in 1990, is some 20% today and is expected by McKinsey & Company, a consulting firm, to rise to 30% by 2015.

全球化差不多就是在全世界范围内的市场的同步化以及商品和服务的统一化。在过去的20年里，这一现象已经变得极为普遍，以至于就算是在越南的一个小乡村里找到了一瓶可口可乐，或者是听说埃森哲咨询公司[译注1]开到了塔什干[乌兹别克斯坦共和国首都]，耐克买到了尼日利亚，也不会有人感到很惊讶。或许统计数字能比较好的反映全球化的发展情况：1990年，全球跨境贸易的总额只占全世界GDP的15%左右。今天，这个数字达到了20%。麦肯锡咨询公司[译注2]预则到2015年，这个数字会达到30%。

Use of the word in this business context is alleged to go back at least as far as 1944, but its first very visible appearance was in the writings of Theodore Levitt (see article), a professor of marketing whose article published by Harvard Business Review in 1983 was entitled “The Globalisation of Markets”. In it he foresaw “the emergence of global markets for standardised products on a previously unimagined scale of magnitude”.

在商业领域开始使用“全球化”这个词至少可以追溯到1944年。但是它第一次真正地被明确提出是在Theodore Levitt的一篇文章上。Theodore Levitt是一位营销学的教授。他的文章《市场的全球化》发表在1983年的哈佛商业评论上。他在文中预测到“一个产品高度标准化的全球性市场即将到来，这种标准化程度将是前所未见的”

In “Can We Sustain Globalisation?”, a report published in 2007 by SustainAbility, a consulting firm, the authors wrote:

在永续咨询公司[译注3]2007发表的一篇报告《我们能一直保持全球化吗？》中，作者写到：

Frustratingly Levitt did not provide a compelling definition of globalisation in his article—and the void has subsequently encouraged a dizzying proliferation of competing definitions.

遗憾的是Levitt在文中并没有对全球化给出一个让所有人都能接受的定义。这个空缺就造成后来出现的大量分歧的定义。

The report claims to have come across more than 5,000 of them. SustainAbility’s favourite is one provided by two Economist journalists. Globalisation, they wrote, “is the freer movement of goods, services, ideas and people around the world”.

这份报告称遇到过5000多种定义。永续公司最满意的定义是由两个经济学人的记者提出来的——“全球化就是世界范围内商品、服务、思想和人员更自由地流动”

The concept was popularised by an American journalist, Thomas Friedman, in his book “The World is Flat”. Published in 2005, it reached the top of several bestseller lists with its headline message that the world is now just one big integrated market.

这个观点被一个美国记者Thomas Friedman的著作《世界是平的》大为推广。这本书出版于2005年，一度在很多畅销书排行榜上都是第一名。它的题目想告诉人们的就是，这个世界其实就是一个大的整合了的市场。

Globalisation has been encouraged by:

全球化的动力来源：

• the growing liberalisation of markets around the world, giving western multinationals access to customers they never thought they would reach;

•世界范围内的市场自由化，让西方诸国有机会得到他们以前从未想过能接触到的消费群；

• easy internet access and cheap international telecommunications, the most obvious manifestation of which is call centres in India that are servicing customers and corporations in Europe and the United States;

•便捷的互联网和花费低廉的国际电子通信。最有力的证据就是，设于印度的电话呼叫中心，其服务的对象却是在欧洲和美国的消费者和公司；
• the rapid growth of large developing countries such as China, India and Brazil, and their growing demand not only for western consumer goods and technologies but also for goods and services from other developing countries. Trade between China and Africa, for instance, rose from $3 billion in 1995 to over $32 billion in 2005.

•中国、印度和巴西这些大的发展中国家的高速发展。在增长的不仅是它们对西方消费品和技术的需求，而且还有它们对其他发展中国家商品和服务的需求。例如，中国和非洲的贸易额，从1995年的30亿增加到2005年的320多亿。

Companies have approached globalisation in two distinct ways. On the one hand are those such as Gillette and Heineken that have made little concession to local tastes and manufacture their goods in a few centralised production facilities that follow strictly uniform standards. “The product must be the same everywhere,” wrote a Heineken chairman recently. “To ensure quality, every 14 days our breweries send samples to professional tasters in the Netherlands.”

有两种截然不同的方式来实现公司的全球化。一种是像吉列和喜力一样，仅根据当地要求做一些小调整，然后在少数中心化的工厂里严格统一标准化地生产他们商品。“所有地方的产品必须一模一样”喜力总裁最近如是说“为了保证质量，我们各地的啤酒厂每14天就会给荷兰专业品酒师寄去一份样品。”

On the other hand are companies that tailor their products or services for each local market. Among them are Japanese carmakers such as Toyota, which now has plants in several countries producing for local markets, and Coca-Cola, which never tastes quite the same from one country to the next. A former chief executive of Coca-Cola admitted that the company had once upon a time changed its globalisation strategy. “We used to be an American company with a large international business,” he said. “Now we’re a large international company with a sizeable American business.”

另一种方式就是为当地的市场量身定做他们的商品或者服务。这样的公司有日本的汽车制造商丰田和可口可乐。丰田目前计划在几个国家开始本土化的生产。可口可乐在每个国家的味道都不完全一样。可口可乐的前任首席执行官承认他们公司曾经一度改变过他们的全球化战略“我们从前是个有很多国际业务的美国公司。”他说到“现在我们是个拥有大量美国业务的庞大的国际化的公司。”