To address the concerns for job losses of the
protectionist/anti-outsourcing, Friedman (2006, pp. 264) argues that the global
pie (market) not only grows larger-because more people will have more income to
spend, but also grows more complex - as more new jobs and new specialties are
created.
Mann (2006) suggests that lower prices afforded by globalisation
promote greater adoption and diffusion of IT throughout the economy. However, she argues that globalisation
forces have not been evenly distributed, as illuminated by increased job churns
and widening wage disparities, therefore requiring careful adjustment for labor
market. International trade in services
could account for up to one-half of the total gain from liberalizing
agriculture, manufacturing, and services. To reap the greater gain from service
sectors needs a more liberalized trade regime.
Finally, Mann (ibid.) concludes that a proactive policy agenda put
forward must meet global challenges as well as the challenges of technological
innovation and business transformation.
In criticising neo-classical model favouring globalisation,
Culpeper (2005) tends to focus on rising inequity between alleged low-income
workers and high-income capitalists that in facto are of different business
entity by nature, and plays down like the Bretton Woods schools do, the
benefits and economics of scale, that indeed lead to poverty reduction as well
as to improve well-being of the poor in developing countries like China and
India over the past twenty years. Similarly, his reasoning is favouring
low-income workers and biased toward the owners of capital arguing that the
latter would reap higher returns from abroad, widening the income inequality
(see Culpeper, 2005, pp. 8-9). At the same time, the narrow consideration of
economic growth (ibid.) overlooks the growth potential through the inflow of
capital that can be used to stimulate the economy in home country by investing
more in headquarters and hence generating more jobs to commensurate with the
job losses of less-skilled labours, who will have to upgrade their skills and
create add-in values vis-à-vis globalising workforce. Although some authors
(Avgerou 2003b, pp. 382-83) argue that new industrialized countries (NIC) like
East Asian Tigers (Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore) represent a
small proportion of developing countries and these NICs have succeeded through
a series of careful planning and modest policy implementation, with which
developing countries are hard to emulate; however arguably, it is evident from
a passage of Parthasarathy’s conclusion (2004, pp.30) that experience could be
duplicated in its own right:
While the market opportunities provided to the
Indian software industry by technological developments since the 1970s, and the
political and institutional changes behind the liberal policies that allowed
the industry to seize the opportunities, were historically specific and
socially contingent, the Indian experience nevertheless offers at least a
couple of lessons for other NICs entering the software industry. The Indian
experience shows that it is possible to enter the global market and go through
a process of learning with the one key advantage that NICs possess: low-wage
labor, although in the case of software the labor must also be relatively
high-skilled. . . .The Indian strategy and experience with software services is
not very different from the strategy and experience of a Taiwan or a South
Korea in manufacturing, although there is one difference. Where in the case of
the East Asian NICs, it was mass manufacture that provided the means for
their “late industrialization” efforts, in the Indian case, it has been the
provision of custom software services.
Perhaps average income level and living standard, instead of
overwhelming emphasis on inequality, are the issues concerning us the most as
yet. Flexibility and agility, likely complementary to the controversial
“free-market competition” mechanism, are the most needed by nation states for
intervention and to adapt to the process of globalisation at their own pace. Or
inferring from Avegrou’s finding (2003b, pp. 379-83), we could be in favour of
new institutionalist economics (NIE) demanding the provision of
outside-the-market institutions to correct market failure.