Technology and the global imperative Not only is globalisation bringing countries closer together and integrating them more fully, but the nature of technology is ensuring that the goods (and, increasingly, services) being traded are a bad fit for the Adam Smith free-market model (or the Ricardian cloth-for-wine model).
The old economy, with its bales of wool and slabs of steel, is being replaced by an economy in which services are much more important, and in which information goods or knowledge goods are far more important in consumers’ purchases, and are readily internationally traded.