How has increasing globalization affected business?

What will be an ideal response?

Answer: Globalization has impacted how and where companies do business. Free trade areas—agreements that reduce tariffs and barriers among trading partners—encourage international trade. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the European Union (EU) are examples. Globalization has boomed for the past 50 or so years. For example, the total sum of U.S. imports and exports rose from $47 billion in 1960, to $562 billion in 1980, to about $5.1 trillion recently. Changing economic and political philosophies drove this boom. Governments dropped cross-border taxes or tariffs, formed economic free trade areas, and took other steps to encourage the free flow of trade among countries. The fundamental economic rationale was that by doing so, all countries would gain, and indeed, economies around the world did grow quickly until recently. At the same time, globalization vastly increased international competition. More globalization meant more competition, and more competition meant more pressure to be "world class"—to lower costs, to make employees more productive, and to do things better and less expensively. As multinational companies jockey for position, many transfer operations abroad, not just to seek cheaper labor but to tap into new markets. For example, Toyota has thousands of sales employees based in America, while GE has over 10,000 employees in France. The search for greater efficiencies prompts some employers to offshore (export jobs to lower-cost locations abroad, as when Dell offshored some call-center jobs to India). Some employers offshore even highly skilled jobs such as lawyer. Managing the "people" aspects of globalization is a big task for any company that expands abroad—and for its HR managers.