Accelerating Global Interaction

Global Interaction and the Transformation of the World Economy
What factors contributed to economic globalization during the twentieth century?
1. After World War II, leading capitalist countries such as the United States vowed to never go through the same conditions as they did during the Great Depression. In order to that, they formed a post-globalization made up of institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. This became the start of a somewhat free trade among major capitalist countries.
2.Technology continued to develop and made information travel faster and products ship faster and cheaper.
3. A country that has a growing population, together with growing economies and modernizing societies results to citizens that are hungry for further modern development.

Reglobalization
In what ways has economic globalization linked the world's peoples more closely together?
After the development of the "reglobalization" of the world economy, there was a significant increase in the circulation of goods, capital and people. Foreign direct investment emerged, which means companies from first world countries are setting up their labor-centered companies in third wold countries where they can get cheap labor, resources, tax breaks and more relax environmental regulations. If the first world countries are not bringing their companies to the third world countries, they are bringing people, mostly professional and skilled workers such as doctors, nurses and engineers, to their country. We are more familiar of these concepts today as outsourcing. With the increasing rate of unemployment, it has become one of the big debates but it is still hard to compete with the incentives that big companies are getting from it. Outsourcing continues to grow and has taken an unexpected expansion to other fields such as in medicine. An example would be the outsourcing of radiology services. Because of shortage of radiologists in the US, hospitals have now set up a remote radiology base in third world countries with an overflow of radiologists like India. After a radiology exam is performed, films are sent to the remote site and initial reading can be made. Hospital administrators argued that this has not only made services faster but also safer because with the initial reading, they'll be able to catch whatever is wrong with the patient right away, right when they are still in the facility. Patients on the other hand are more concerned about their privacy, with their medical information now circulating in different locations. The other term that we hear nowadays is medical tourism, where patients get treated and get surgeries done in countries where medical fees are cheaper compared to what they would've paid in the US even with insurance coverage.