Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Marketing Internacional
Prof. Jorge Cassalins
lending from Bretton Woods along with liberalization prescriptions of the SAPs saw developing countries
reduce tariffs, open up to foreign investment and reduce subsidies and state involvement in their
economies. Cold War bad lending and proxy wars created rampant corruption and fueled conflicts that had
their roots in colonialism, contributing to a wildly distorted global economy. Communications technology and
liberalization of finance and pure capital created the de-localizing character of globalization, vastly distorted
winners and losers and concentrated wealth in major urban financial centres. Since 1989, the other
international economy centered in Soviet socialism and the network of socialist states began to rapidly
dissolve with the fall of the Iron Curtain, opening the possibility for a global economy. Today, therefore, it is
possible to describe the international economy as one of globalization in the sense that goods, capital,
investment and production can flow across nearly any border driven by market forces rather than state
forces. The markets that are not integrated significantly into the global economy are less significant, are not
free from the influence of globalization and face globalizing pressures.
Market integration for the developing countries is marked by a low level of participation in the more valuable
segments of the supply chain, demonstrating that liberalizing policies alone cant achieve integration and
can actually work against it. The mass liberalization during the SAP period drove down commodity prices
while the share of exports in commodities for developing countries remained too high. At the same time, the
value of capital moved to technology and knowledge largely monopolized in the West, known as the
knowledge economy. The question remains as to whether developing countries are truly integrated into the
economy of finance, high technology and knowledge where most of the wealth is concentrated and
whether finance, high-technology and knowledge actually operate as free markets. For instance, a
consumer purchasing pharmaceuticals is faced with a virtual no-choice purchase (perhaps life or death)
from a firm with a 20 year monopoly on pricing. This has to be the farthest thing from perfect competition,
which is a free market's answer to efficiency and social welfare for the consumer. Add to this, the duplicitous
position of Northern countries on liberalization and protection. Northern countries ask developing countries
to liberalize indiscriminately for their own good, while they themselves pick and choose which industries to
protect and when to liberalize them. Are they really promoting free trade, or just dominance over trade?
The second paradigm revisited
To return to the original paradigms, the societies pursuing slower growth, friendly trade and sustainable
resource use were slower to migrate, since mass migration in the last few centuries has largely been a
product of empire. These societies are known as indigenous since they form the original peoples in the
lands they occupy. The indigenous civilizations viewed property in a less fixed fashion, and slower material
progress and less emphasis on dominance meant they had not acquired the technologies and resource
systems for military strength. The meeting of dominance/progress societies with fixed property and higher
military capability, with mutually relating/sustainability societies with loosely defined collective territory and
lower military technology put the latter at a disadvantage in land dealings and military, and to add to this
their populations were often decimated by disease they hadn't been exposed to before.
However, it can also be argued that the dominance/progress paradigm has been its own worst enemy, if the
lasting well-being of the majority of people is any type of goal for economics. The lack of real mutuality in
trade predictably resulted in mutual loss on many levels, even as material gains flowed to to the dominant in
dominance/progress socieities. The fast growth civilizations created enormous instability and inequity within
their own societies and dominated other indigenous and non-indigenous societies. The domination over
indigenous societies has created a long-lasting state of unequal and strained relations between them, and
the domination of non-indigenous societies has created long-lasting enmities and cyclical war. The real
questions of globalization as market integration is whether the paradigm of progress/dominance has ever
created real free markets given the significant distortions that the pursuit of dominance creates? Can such a
paradigm create stable market integration that can last more than a few historical seconds before imploding
in environmental and violent catastrophes? Is there a second trend slower to mature and arising from the
paradigm of sustainability/mutual trade, that will create true market integration globally - one that is
sustainable, being based on ecological wisdom and friendly trade?