Huge progress in the field of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), along with falling transport costs and the lowering of trade barriers, has led to a radical acceleration of the globalization process.
Some go even further and explicitly define this process as the third industrial revolution, envisioning medical services that could be performed remotely, such as radiological examinations of Americans, consisting of images taken in the United States and described by a doctor in India or Australia. New technologies break boundaries and reach further than our imagination. Tax returns for nearly half a million Americans are filled out by tax advisors in India, and the service for drivers at some McDonald’s is organized in such a way that the voice from the microphone is the voice of a person located several thousand kilometers away; the same applies to booking a table at some restaurants. This phenomenon, known as outsourcing and offshoring, has radically increased labor productivity, improved the quality of products and services, and lowered prices. Even telephone consumer satisfaction surveys in the USA are often conducted by call centers in India. Progress in the field of ICT is also one of the main factors explaining why the United States economy has grown much faster than the Eurozone economy over the last 10 years. Available studies show that, thanks in part to the use of ICT in retail and wholesale trade, labor productivity in these sectors grew many times faster in the United States than in Europe. The world’s largest supermarket chain, the American Wal-Mart, has implemented new RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology, which will allow for further increases in network efficiency and a reduction in logistics-related costs. Most of Wal-Mart’s suppliers must also implement this technology.
The above examples show that progress in the field of the electronic economy, or e-economy, enables global optimization of the production process, which leads to rapid productivity growth, quality improvement, price reduction, and thus provides far-reaching benefits to consumers. It turns out that the Polish economy ranks high in most rankings determining investment or offshoring attractiveness, even though we are at the very bottom when it comes to readiness to implement the e-economy, and our main assets include a favorable location, a large market, and well-educated and relatively cheap employees. This means that the process of globalizing production and services can be an opportunity for our country for rapid development if we remove our main shortcomings, among which are the low level of advancement in the field of e-economy and e-administration. We cannot stand still, because other countries are quickly building a modern e-economy.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka”, No. 3/2006.