Drucker sees four world economies emergin: a world economy of information; of money; of multinationals (one no longer dominated by American enterprises); and a mercantilist world economy of goods, services and trade.
Information:
In the long run, the most important implication is probably the impact of information on mentality and awareness. It creates new affinities and new communities. The woman student in Shanghai who taps into the Internet remains Chinese, but she sees herself at the same time as a member of a worldwide, non-national "information society." ....
Money
The next major economic crisis will most probably be a crisis of the U.S. dollar in the world economy....
This has important repercussions for all sorts of American organizations paying American workers in U.S. dollars.The government deficit is therefore being financed almost in its entirety by foreign investments in the United States, mostly in government securities like short-term treasury notes and medium-term bonds. The Japanese are converting most, if not all, of their trade surplus with the United States into dollar-denominated U.S. government securities and have thus become the largest U.S. creditor....
This, needless to say, is an unstable and volatile system. It would collapse if the foreign holders of U.S. government securities (above all, the Japanese) were for whatever reason (such as a crash in their own economy) to dump their holdings of U.S. government securities....
Multinationals:
There were 7,258 multinational companies worldwide in 1969. Thirty-one years later, in 2000, the number had increased ninefold to more than 63,000. By that year, multinationals accounted for 80 percent of the world's industrial production....
American-based multinationals are only a fraction--and a diminishing one--of all multinationals. Only 185 of the world's 500 largest multinationals--fewer than 40 percent--are headquartered in the United States (the European Union has 126, Japan 108). And multinationals are growing much faster outside the United States, especially in Japan, Mexico, and lately, Brazil....
The New Mercantilism
The modern state was invented by the French political philosopher Jean Bodin in his 1576 book Six Livres de la Republique. He invented the state for one purpose only: to generate the cash needed to pay the soldiers defending France against a Spanish army financed by silver from the New World--the first standing army since the Romans' more than a thousand years earlier....
However discredited as economic theory, mercantilism, not Adam Smith's free trade, thus became the policy and practice of governments virtually everywhere....
But mercantilism is increasingly becoming the policy of "blocs" rather than of individual nation-states. These blocs--with the European Union the most structured one, and the U.S.-dominated NAFTA trying to embrace the entire Western Hemisphere (or at least North and Central America)--are becoming the integrating units of the new world economy. Each bloc is trying to establish free trade internally and to abolish within the bloc all hurdles, restrictions and impediments, first to the movement of goods and money and ultimately to the movement of people. The United States, for instance, has proposed extending NAFTA to embrace all of Central America.
At the same time, each bloc is becoming more protectionist against the outside....
For thirty years after World War II, the U.S. economy dominated practically without serious competition. For another twenty years it was clearly the world's foremost economy and especially the undisputed leader in technology and innovation.
.... it is facing rivals that, either singly or in combination, could conceivably make America Number Two.
