In The News

Silicon Valley Dons a Brave Face, Despite Worries

S.L. Bachman April 28, 2004
During the 1990s, Silicon Valley reigned supreme as the heart of technological innovation and the birthplace of the information technology revolution. Today, says globalization scholar S.L. Bachman, the tech hub is scrambling to mobilize regional resources to compete in the international technology market it helped to create. Economically, the San Francisco Bay region is recovering from the...

Losing Our Edge?

Thomas L. Friedman April 22, 2004
After talking to high-tech entrepreneurs in California's Silicon Valley, New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman felt "a real undertow of concern that America is losing its competitive edge vis-à-vis China, India, Japan and other Asian tigers, and that the Bush team is deaf, dumb and blind to this situation." Executives "complained bitterly" that the...

Outsourcing, Turned Inside Out

Ken Belson April 11, 2004
While most Americans today have heard about and many already been alarmed by the outsourcing of jobs overseas, some others might not be as worried; those include the employees of South Korean semiconductor company Samsung in Austin, Texas. The company just announced that it would pump another $500 into its Texas plant, adding an additional 300 jobs to its 700-people workforce. Samsung is not...

R & D: India's New Star Industry

Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar April 10, 2004
American multinational companies are setting up research and development (R & D) centers in India, participating in a new trend in the contemporary era of global capitalism - the outsourcing of production activities.. No longer content to only look overseas for low-wage service sector jobs like call centers, large US corporations are tapping into the technical expertise and specialized...

Pentagon Seeks to Use Foreign Airlines

Micheline Maynard April 10, 2004
When the war in Iraq broke out and American troops and equipment were being transported half way across the world to the Middle East, people realized that not all the carriers involved in the transportation were in the US Air Force fleet. Instead, American owned commercial airlines did a large part of the job. Recently, however, the Pentagon announced that it wanted to include foreign airlines...

Kenya: Globalizing with Flowers

Jean-Pierre Lehmann April 9, 2004
Although Kenya has attracted some foreign dollars through tourism and export-based flower and tea industries, a majority of Kenyans remain mired in poverty. Jean-Pierre Lehmann, founding director of the Evian group, argues here that although its future could be bright, Kenya has not yet exploited its substantial political and economic assets in a way that will allow it to fully tap into...

Innovative India

April 5, 2004
As the American elections draw near, the Economist takes a refreshing look at the outsourcing debate. Examining advances made in research and development (R&D) in India’s high-tech centers such as Bangalore, the article reports that many Indian IT professionals are rightly vexed about the portrayal of their country as merely “a source of cheap labor and a telecommunications link.” Although...