A radical shift in economic integration

18 Apr A radical shift in economic integration

The connectivity of the current age is of a fundamentally different order to what has gone before. Today, the speed of communications allows for information and services to be exchanged in the blink of an eye. At the same time, goods are able to traverse the globe with unprecedented efficiency and speed. The complexity and size of the networks involved is evidenced by the fact that as recently as the mid-1970s it took more than 24 hours for the world to record $10 billion in global trade. That trade total is achieved in one second in the contemporary world. One innovation affected contemporary globalization arguably more than any other. It was not one of the digital technologies involving undersea cables nor was it the satellites that make it possible for information streaming to fill almost every hour of every day of our lives. Rather, it was a largely uncelebrated and relatively unimpressive twenty-foot long, eight-foot wide, eight and a half-foot tall steel box, held together by welds and rivets, with two doors at one end. It was the freight container.