Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Ghemawat: the world isn't flat

Strategy guru Pankaj Ghemawat, a long time opponent of "borderless world" or "flat world" view, pulled out some new evidence at TED:
Some cool statistics:
  • Cross-border information flow (world ratio of foreign to total voice-calling minute): 2%* 
  • Cross-border people flow (ratio of 1st generation immigrants to world population): 3% 
  • Cross-border capital flow (ratio of FDI to total investments in the world): 10% 
  • Cross-border goods/services flow (world exports to GDP ratio): ~20% 
What's more interesting is that, when people are asked to give an estimate of all the above measures, they all tend to overestimate them -- by 3 or 4 times!!!

* adding internet traffic to the picture, the ratio of cross-border information flow could go up to 6-7%

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