Prime Time 5/6, Language in Use, Arbeitsheft

Globalisation 1 Globalisation shakes the world a) Read the following text on globalisation. Look for the words from the blue box in the text and underline them. billing • economic growth • economic superpower • from boom to bust • industrial revolution • information technology • to lay off sb. • multinational company • outsourcing • overseas • payroll • post-war years • services sector • trade • white collar job TIP • Prime Time 6: Unit 5  S. 60 For Santosh, a tour guide in Bangalore, life is good. As a result of the IT boom, he has started his own web-based travel firm and sells weekend holidays to stressed-out IT workers. For Dean Braid, a skilled car engineer in Flint, Michigan, life is not so good. He – and 28,000 other workers – was laid off by General Motors in 1999 and hasn’t found a job since. The accelerating pace of globalisation is having a profound effect on life in rich and poor countries alike, transforming regions such as Detroit or Bangalore from boom to bust – or vice versa – in a generation. In economic terms, globalisation refers to the growing economic integration of the world, as trade and money increasingly cross international borders. Globalisation is not new, but is a product of the industrial revolution. Britain grew rich in the 19 th century as the first global economic superpower, because of its superior manufacturing technologies and better global communications such as steamships and railroads. But the pace and scale of globalisation have accelerated dramatically sinceWorldWar II, and especially in the last 25 years. The rapid spread of information technology (IT) and the internet is changing the way companies organise production, and increasingly allowing services as well as manufacturing to be globalised. In the post-war years more and more of the global production has been carried out by big multinational companies which operate across borders. Multinationals have become increasingly global, locating manufacturing plants overseas in order to profit from cheaper labour costs and to be closer to their markets. More recently, some multinationals like Apple have become “virtual firms” outsourcing most of their production to other companies, mainly in Asia. It is not only theWestern manufacturing industry that is under threat from globalisation. The services sector, which includes everything from hairdressers to education and software development, is also increasingly affected by globalisation. Many service sector jobs are now under threat from outsourcing, as global companies try to save money by shifting many functions that were once done internally. What China has become to manufacturing, India has become to the new world of business process outsourcing (BPO), which includes everything from payroll to billing to IT support. The pace of change in the new world of globalisation can be frightening. A recent poll by Deloitte in November 2006 showed a sharp increase in the number of people who worry about outsourcing of white collar jobs in the UK. The key question is whether the growing globalisation of the world economy will lead to a parallel increase in global regulation – and whether that would be good or bad for economic growth and equality worldwide. (Steve Schifferes, BBC News Online , 21 January 2007; adapted and abridged) 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 52 Globalisation 18 Nur zu Prüfzweck n – Eigentum des Verlags öbv