Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
which themselves are divergent, rather than the urge simply for more wealth. It is
such trends that are documented by the move towards post-modernity observed
widely by social scientists since the 1970s.
Ohmae's observations about the global views of the young can also be
qualified. All young people grow old, and there is no reason to believe that the
youth of Japan, like those of Europe, will not place more value on local and
national traditions as they age, while their own children are seen as the new
iconoclasts.
New global regions
It is possible, however, to agree with Ohmae about the emergence of a different
set of economic regions. Even if we do not accept with him that “the glue
holding traditional nation states together, at least in economic terms, has begun
to dissolve” (1995:79), it is evident that there are some new geographical
groupings coming into being which do not conform to national boundaries. Some
of the meaningful new regions are subnational, and some are transnational. It is
even possible to agree with Drucker (1989) in his claim that the economy is
partially organized without any direct reference to geography, by TNCS with
global reach, and by the global economy itself.
The most striking of the new geo-economic regions are those crossing major
international boundaries, and of course some of them owe their raison d'être to
the boundaries. This is the case for the region along the US-Mexican border,
where industries on the us side have grown up which depend for much of their
labour-intensive work on partner firms or factories on the Mexican side. They
benefit from lower wage costs, but are conveniently centred within the USA and
have good access to its markets. A comparable case is that of Hong Kong and the
adjacent parts of southern China, in Guang Zhong province, where China itself
has set up major industrial towns producing for Hong Kong companies using
very low cost Chinese labour, instead of bringing that labour to Hong Kong
itself, as happened through the 1950s and 1960s. The region of Hong Kong,
Shenzen, Guangzhou, Amoy and Zhuhai is already a major global manufacturing
region. Another such region, with its focus on Singapore, includes the Malaysian
state of Johore and the Riau Islands of Indonesia. Global regions within
individual states are cited too, one being the Mississippi Valley, with its rapidly
expanding set of car manufacturing plants, many of them having Japanese
owners, but feeding into global markets. Another global region, itself having a
GNP that is second only to the whole nations of the USA and Germany, is the
Shikoken region between Tokyo and Nagoya in Japan.
It should be noted that the new global economic regions are not necessarily
tied to the operation of the footloose TNCS. The reason such regions exist is to
do with spatial permanence and an investment in a particular geographic space.
Many of today's international companies are in fact quite traditional MNCS,
with a continuing power base in one country and subsidiaries outside. Thus, for
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