A bumpy road to a flat world

In this country we seldom talk about globalisation except in the context of fighting back. Oil prices have risen to catch us by the throat. Irregular immigrants besiege us. Even those who welcome the opening of cultural horizons usually manage to turn it into a way of fighting back the local princes of darkness.

The rhetoric of survival and resistance has its place. Thomas Friedman's latest book on globalisation - The World is Flat - is clear about that. China's consumption of oil is nowhere near, yet, where it could be. About 1,000 new cars are entering Beijing's streets each day (yes, 30,000 per month). There is a brewing environmental crisis. And there is a new pool of three billion people (from India, China, Russia, central and eastern Europe, and Latin America) entering the global economy - thanks to the current platform of information and communication technologies that are creating a "flat world", a level playing field.

Or rather, a series of enclaves in these territories are doing so but the prospect is that more and more people will, at a fast rate. No job is really safe. Even a meal at a restaurant can be globalised: some bookings for US restaurants are now done by call centres in India.

The developed world needs to keep creating new areas of high value-added economic activity to stay ahead. As one of Mr Friedman's Indian interviewees points out, this means that while the countries doing the catching up know where they are going, the countries at the cutting edge need to be creative.

The idea of inventing globalisation, however, making globalisation work for you rather than just fighting back, dominates the 470-page book. It is not just the way that companies like the United Parcel Service (UPS) transformed itself from a US package-delivery service into an international supply chain for multinationals. The inventiveness, the search for excellence not just survival, is there even among the poorest of the poor.

One not-for-profit enterprise in Cambodia is part-owned by someone who 14 years ago was living in a refugee camp. He now manages a company based in three countries that transcribes NGO reports into electronic files. His employees can type and know some English - although what is important is not knowing the language but typing correctly (two employees type the same document with a computer checking if they are identical).

Some of his former employees, discovering that NGOs did not keep documents in standard formats, have branched off on their own - offering a higher value service in transforming the documents into standard templates, which are then digitalised.

The inventiveness sometimes leads huge companies to collaborate with poor villages. Hewlett Packard, consulting with Indian villagers whose electricity supply was unreliable but who also need photographs for official uses taken regularly, designed a solar energy panel-cum-backpack that can recharge a digital camera and printer. The result: a budding photography service that saved villagers from making long-distance trips to have photos taken, as well as created jobs.

According to Mr Friedman, being inventive in the global economy bears some relation to one's hold on natural resources. It helps not to have them: "The fewer natural resources your country or company has, the more you will dig inside yourself for innovations in order to survive... Countries without natural resources are much more likely... to develop the habits of openness to new ideas, because it is the only way they can survive and advance".

Translated back into the Maltese context, it means that one of the ways to react to the rising and rising price of oil is to invest more in human resources. But it needs focused investment. Mr Friedman and many of his interviewees tend to stress science and engineering. It is clear, however, that the high value-added services, the management of relationships with clients, the identification of areas where potential customers have strategic conflicts that need resolution: skills in these areas, which other disciplines can give you, are also needed.

Inventiveness and investment in human resources are needed because the future is open and unstable - developments cannot really be predicted. Mr Friedman, a globe-trotting journalist, could barely recognise Beijing from one visit to the next.

But inventiveness and education will give a person and a society some of the resources needed to react rapidly to change.

But that is not just what is needed: "What we don't know... is the answer to the question of why one country gets its act together to do all these things [institutional and market reforms plus good governance, infrastructure and ability to globalise] in a sustained manner and why another doesn't".

Still, Friedman identifies two intangible qualities, difficult to measure but which matter: "A society's ability and willingness to pull together and sacrifice for the sake of economic development and the presence in society of leaders with the vision to see what needs to be done in terms of development and the willingness to use power to push for change rather than... preserve the status quo. Some countries (such as Korea and Taiwan) seem able to focus their energies on the priority of economic development, and others (such as Egypt and Syria) get distracted by ideology or local feuds".

Do I really need to ask which pair of countries Malta most resembles at the moment?

ranierfsadni@europe.com