Showing posts with label globalisation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label globalisation. Show all posts

10 July 2008

Globalisation's Upside

Yes, there is one:

The European Union is moving forward with regulations that will significantly restrict the amount of power electric appliances can consume in standby, or "vampire," mode.

...

As far as I can tell, the United States has nothing similar at a federal level. The 2007 Energy Act only requires that the Department of Energy "incorporate energy use in standby mode and off mode" in "future standards for covered products."

But no worries -- if the Asian manufacturers who currently produce the bulk of the world's appliances are forced to rejigger their designs for the EU market, they'll probably do so as well for products aimed at the U.S.

One of many examples where the global nature of production means that the *most stringent" rules get applied to everyone.

06 June 2008

Expensive Oil and the Analogue World

Fascinating stuff:

We usually think about technological improvements in productivity as benefiting the highly skilled and educated, and disenfranchising the poorly skilled and uneducated, but what I find most interesting about globalization in an era of $127 dollar-a-barrel oil is that blue-collar workers who make physical things in the West will stand to benefit, newly protected from foreign competition by energy tariffs, while white-collar workers who live off their wits will still feel the immense pressure of competing with everyone else in the world.

03 October 2007

How Europe Can Save the World

One of the things I've always admired about Richard Stallman is his belief that if you do the Right Thing, eventually you'll win everyone over. That's seems to be happening in software, but I've always been slightly sceptical that it might work elsewhere. I was wrong, it seems:

The European Union's drive to set standards has many causes—and a protectionist impulse within some governments (eg, France's) may be one. But though the EU is a big market, with almost half a billion consumers, neither size, nor zeal, nor sneaky protectionism explains why it is usurping America's role as a source of global standards.

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If you manufacture globally, it is simpler to be bound by the toughest regulatory system in your supply chain. Self-regulation is also a harder sell when it comes to global trade, which involves trusting a long line of unknown participants from far-flung places (talk to parents who buy Chinese-made toys).

..

Obey EU rules or watch your markets “evaporating”, a computer industry lobbyist tells Mr Schapiro. “We've been hit by a tsunami,” says a big wheel from General Motors. American multinationals that spend money adjusting to European rules may lose their taste for lighter domestic regulations that may serve only to offer a competitive advantage to rivals that do not export. Mr Schapiro is a campaigner for tougher regulation of American business. Yet you do not have to share his taste for banning chemicals to agree with his prediction that American industry will want stricter standards to create a level playing-field at home.

What this says is that tough regulations in the EU plus globalisation work to spread high standards for business throughout the world. So how about the following?

If the EU brought in laws that imposed an environmental impact tax on every item sold in the EU - determined by working out the cost/damage to the environment caused by that single item, and calculated by the EU - then the above logic would imply that companies around the world, including the US and China, would have very strong incentives to minimise environmental damage.

Moreover, as the above quotation points out, global companies would also start pushing for such legislation to be enacted in their home markets in order to create a level playing-field with their local competitors. The greenness would flow from Europe across the world, without the need for a post-Kyoto treaty or anything similar.

C'mon Europe, time to save the world. (Via PlexNex.)