Global economy – factors and determinants of its development
Over the last 30 years, the development of the world economy has been strongly stimulated by globalization, the roots of which lay in changing geopolitical conditions and the accompanying transformations of economic structures that occurred as a result of progressive processes of economic deregulation and market liberalization, supported by world economic leaders and increasingly powerful international organizations and groups.
The processes of economic integration, and consequently all types of markets and economic organizations, launched with great momentum, created unprecedented facilities for the development of trade and business operations on a global scale. These changes led to the gradual transformation of the traditional model of the world economy’s functioning, as a disintegrated system, into a qualitatively new, significantly more liberalized and sufficiently integrated in economic-organizational and institutional terms model of the world economy, now referred to as the global economy. This global, relatively coherent economic system is linked not only by a network of political relations based on a created system of international legal regulations, but also, if not primarily, by a network of economic ties, among which the greatest importance is attributed to supply networks and the supply chains functioning within them. Supply networks, grouping entities with diverse characteristics and production profiles operating in differently configured global supply chain systems, are connected by flows of physical products, information, financial streams, people, and other resources that bind this network-organized economic structure together.
Supply chains and networks organized and functioning in the international dimension in this way integrate centers of supply, production, distribution, and consumption on a global scale (cf. Figure 1). They also simultaneously integrate and optimize all functions, processes, and tasks performed by individual links of such shaped systems, i.e., purchasing, transport, warehousing, production, distribution, marketing, finance, returns, etc. Supply networks and chains thus create the foundations for a new, subjectively, functionally, and spatially integrated organization of conducting business activities on a global scale, including international trade and transport, while simultaneously rationalizing the implementation of economic processes in terms of cost and time, thereby facilitating and supporting economic development.
Source: Logistyka Magazine
Grzelakowski_Europejska_przestrzen_transportowa_i_logistyczna.pdf