Globalization, Europeanization and Trade in the 1990s: Export Responses of Foreign and Indigenous Manufacturing Companies

Within little more than a decade, the word globalization has gone from being a ‘catch-all’ term used in the economics media to capture the process of integration in world financial, product and service markets, to a term that is now used widely to describe the impact of increased international integration across a range of fields — from literature to sociology to technology. More recently the term has begun to acquire a pejorative dimension, as ‘anti-globalization’ has become the slogan of groups critical of what they see as the exploitation by large corporate interests in the developed world of smaller companies in lesser-developed economies. Indeed, this shift in the meaning of globalization has led some economists (for example, Rodrik 2000:177) to favour the term ‘international economic integration’ as being ‘self evident to economists’ and less loaded with value judgements. Were this trend to continue, one could see the word entirely disappear from use as quickly as it appeared, to be replaced with parallel expressions such as ‘international social integration’ and ‘international cultural integration’. This would be a loss in terms of our language as these terms lack the breadth that ‘globalization’ evokes as well as its strong inter- and cross-disciplinary associations.