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ECONOMICS
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The past decade has seen tremendous changes in the world economy. Many of these changes are linked to new technological advances that have trans- formed what the global economy produces, the ways in which many goods and services are produced, where they are produced, and how goods and services are transferred from the firms that produce them to the households, governments, and other firms that buy them. New technologies are transforming everything, from how airlines sell tickets to how automobiles are produced, from how we buy books to how we communicate with one another.
Like the industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that transformed first Britain and then other countries from agricultural to manufacturing- based economies, the information revolution of the late twentieth and early twenty- first centuries promises to transform almost all aspects of our daily lives. In 1999, in recognition of the growing importance of new, high-tech firms, Microsoft and Intel— the producer of the Windows computer operating system and the major producer of the microprocessors at the heart of personal computers, respectively—were added to the Dow-Jones Industrial Average, the most widely followed index of prices on U.S. stock markets. Though the booming stock market of the late 1990s that was driven in part by enthusiasm for new technologies came to an end in 2000, innovation continues to be a critical force in the economy.
But the old economy is still alive and kicking. Four of the five largest United States corporations in Fortune magazine’s top 500 list for 2003 were traditional industrial firms—General Motors, Exxon, Ford, and General Electric. IBM at number 8 and Verizon Communications at number 10 were the only information or “tech” firms in the top 10. Hewlett-Packard was number 14 and Dell Computers was 36, but Microsoft managed to make it no higher than number 47.
So the old economy and the new economy coexist side by side. But it is not just the emergence of new software and Internet companies that represents the effects of new technologies.
Joseph E. Stiglitz and Carl E. Walsh - Personal Name
4th Edtion
0-393-11644-1
NONE
ECONOMICS
Management
English
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
2006
USA
1-971
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