Globalisation goes further

There's a trend among world's mulitinational corporations to move not only production facilities in developing countries but headquarters as well. UNCTAD, United Nations Agency for Trade and Development, says nearly quarter of those HQ were established in developed coutries in last 15 months.
Unctad says the most common strategy is to set up regional headquarters in places that have a strategic position in international production systems.
Where all this headquarters go ? Mostly in UK ( 181 in 15 month to march 2003), US (126), Australia ( 54 ) , all industrialised nations. But more and more developing countries are getting on significance. They are: Singapore, Hong Kong, China.
I think I heard that IBM and Microsoft had set up big regional HQ in Singapore.
The economic logic and strategy forced them to do that in the increasingly brutal and competitive economy where main mantra goes- slash costs at every price.
Some of this countries will be winners in the years to come and some of them will be losers in terms of higher unemployment and greater social insecurity. For the host nation it 'll bring local employment opportunities and transfer of skills from western countries. I'm seeing that almost every day here in Croatia (still slow process)
Although we are not main target of those big corporate players for huge invesments because Balkan region has still it's own problems, they are opening subsidaries and transfer know-how to our people who suffered 45 years under different economic models ( colective economy). And there are opportunities for new growth for them and new employment opportunities for our people. But it wan't last forever, I am afraid. We must lean on ourself somehow, small and medium enterprises that can build value for long term , not only on big players. Few years ago our politicians hoped Zagreb ( croatian capitol) could be hub, or business center for the southeeastern Europe. Still, we are far away from that but more and more there are regional HQ in Croatia that could turn that dream into possibility.
As UNCTAD says, countries that get most that sort of investments these days meet these criteria ( I ll compare it to croatian situation):
location ( yes, we have good geo-locations for the region), international accesability ( not good enough yet ) , skilled multilingual workforce ( skilled yes, but not multilingual yet, but it can get better ), high quality of life ( in terms of infrastructure yes, but not by disposable income), low taxes ( getting better but not enough ), excellent communication ( mobile yes, internet fucked up because of fixed line monopoly ), well-developed business support ( accounting , law, PR, Marketing- hell yes, that's good enough ), low risk( no, not at all, politics is still elusive and unpredictible), proximity of customers ( yes, but... I dont know )

Comments

[najem avtodoma]

Nice article. Globalization brings also bad things.