Supply-Chain Survival in the Age of Globalization

CHAPTER 4

The Impact of Globalization

Although, as pointed out in chapter 1, global supply chains are not new, they have grown rapidly in the past few decades to the point where they touch all our lives. Thomas Friedman refers to “supply chaining” as one of the 10 forces that flattened the world.¹ The beginnings of the modern era of globalization can be traced to the large-scale entry of the Japanese into the U.S. auto market in the 1970s and the economic opening of China in the 1980s. The Economist dates the “tipping point” at which globalization became dominant in world economic affairs to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening of Eastern Europe.² In essence, the three-world system (developed world, communist world, and developing world) ...