The Laws of Globalization and Business Applications

Abstract

In The Laws of Globalization and Business Applications, Pankaj Ghemawat continues to defend his antithesis against the common image of the world as global. He does so by introducing the two regularities of international activity: the law of semiglobalization and the law of distance. Through a range of empirical methodologies, Ghemawat tests these two laws and finds that international business interactions rarely exceed 30%. Based on these results, Ghemawat challenges our assumptions that the world is globalized. He explains that international business interactions continue to be important but that the world is rather semiglobalized. The majority of business flows continue to occur locally, which indicates that different types of distance continue to restrain business activities. These findings should, according to Ghemawat, change both how researchers study international business and how companies conduct business.