the effort of governments and companies to apply a label to a diverse package of changes that they find difficult to understand and to justify strategies to adjust to a new
economic world they cannot clearly specify.
While the intensity of interconnection, the volumes of trade and investment set against GDP, have grown dramatically since World War II, we are now only returning to the "intensities" of 1914 after the disruptions of two World Wars and a trade shrinking Great Depression. Noting that we are only now returning to earlier intensities guards against the hyperbole of many discussions of the "new global economy".
"Globalization" as the code word for the present era must then be distinguished clearly from the code words of earlier eras, internationalization and multinationalization. International firms sold abroad. They were distinguished from multinational corporations that produced abroad in a variety of locations. The British era of industrial pre eminence was one of trade; the American era by contrast has been one of
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