The paper was presented at the Polish Logistics Congress “Logistics 2004 – Logistics networks in the integrated European market”. Poznań, May 19-21, 2004.
Economic trends favoring the development of logistics networks
In the last decade, the concept of the New Economy has gained great popularity as a reflection of an economic situation in which the development and dissemination of information and communication technologies have fundamentally changed the practice of doing business, management, and marketing. Such elements of the New Economy as informatization, globalization, network connectivity, customer sovereignty, and the key role of knowledge have become widely accepted foundations of economic development. The view has also become widespread that in the New Economy, the fundamental change is the transition from an economy based on the production of physical goods to an economy based on the production and application of knowledge.
This has led to the view that it is most appropriate to understand the New Economy as a Knowledge-Based Economy, in which information and the skills to use it become, alongside land, labor, and capital, a fourth and increasingly important factor of production.
The main hallmark of the modern economy linked to the development of information and communication technologies is globalization, understood as the process of internationalization of economic activity. It is believed that the process of globalization has been ongoing since the revolution in international transport (steamships) and communication (telegraph). The period of 1870–1914 is considered a time of great progress in globalization, when the era of free trade based on the gold standard and large-scale international migration occurred. Currently, alongside international trade and international capital flows, the investment activities of transnational corporations and the flow of technology are cited as the driving forces of globalization.
Discussing the impact of international trade on the development of globalization processes, it should be emphasized that trade in the last half-century has grown at an average annual rate twice as fast as the growth of global GDP, thanks to which the share of trade in creating the world product increased from 8% in 1950 to 17% in 1975 and to over 25% in 2000. In turn, the liberalization of capital markets has led to a situation where the value of international capital transactions reaches $1,500 billion per day, which means a value more than 50 times greater than trade transactions concluded at the same time.
The widely observed increase in the importance of international corporations in globalization processes is best illustrated by their share in the value of international trade transactions, which reached 75%, with half of this trade consisting of intra-corporate turnover. An important element in assessing globalization trends was the rapid growth of foreign direct investment, which in the last years of the 20th century reached an average annual growth rate of 27%, reaching $1,000 billion in 1999. The development of globalization processes and the associated systematic increase in trade exchange were the result of the development of the world economy and the removal of barriers in international trade, as well as the development of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies). This led to the creation of information and communication networks, which, according to experts, have become the most important technological tool of the modern economy, used for collecting, processing, transmitting, and distributing information in order to increase economic productivity. M. Castells put forward the thesis that social structures, economic structures, the public sphere, and culture are adopting the logic of the network, which makes modern information societies become network societies. It is believed that at the root of these changes lies the global computer network, which is the Internet, which has no ordered structure, governing body, or formal owner. This network, as a medium of universal communication, and especially its most important tool, the WWW (World Wide Web), has dominated the global economy and caused an increase in the importance of information as the primary resource of enterprises.
The development of the Internet became the foundation for the expansion of the e-economy, understood as a virtual arena where economic activity is conducted, transactions are carried out, value is created and exchanged, and direct contacts between its participants mature. The e-economy has caused the boundaries of time and space to be crossed within the network connection between producers, suppliers, distributors, and consumers. The widespread use of the Internet network in e-business forces a change in the way companies function, directed towards a networked economy. Important elements of this economy have become electronic markets, which are a platform for the formation of dynamically changing supply chains.
Narrower concepts in relation to the e-economy are e-business and e-commerce.
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