Globalization has improved access to technology

The argument

The mechanism this argument identifies is market size. If Ericsson, the Swedish telecom company, had not enjoyed access to global markets — leaving only Swedes to buy their products — its technology would have taken much longer to reach international markets, because the demand and the revenue needed to carry it outward would not have existed. The consequence would not have stopped at one firm. As a result, the development of 3G and 4G networks, which featured GSM technology that built on the mobile technology in Ericsson's products, may have taken far longer. Each generation of the technology rests on the one before it, so a delay early in that chain is inherited by everything downstream of it. The pace at which technologies reach people illustrates what open markets change. When the telephone was invented, it took 75 years to reach one million users. The radio needed 38 years to reach the same number of users. By contrast, the internet developed 50 million users in just four years. The pattern across those three cases is a collapsing interval between invention and mass adoption, which proponents attribute to the fact that a new technology is no longer confined to the country that produced it. The benefits claimed for that acceleration are cumulative. This increased access to new technology allows for more innovation, because more people can build on what already exists; faster rates of development; increased productivity; and reduced inequality between developed and developing nations, since the gap between having a technology and not having it closes sooner. In the Indian state of Kerala, for example, the increased availability of mobile phones allowed fishermen from different towns to coordinate their pricing strategies, increasing profits by an average of 8% — a gain that went to people far from where the technology was invented.

Context

Access to global markets allows new technologies to spread more rapidly. This allows for increased innovation, faster technological developments, and reduced research and development costs.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The transfer of technology only takes place in the form of consumable products. This means the economic benefits of technology transfers to developing nations are largely absent. The traditional model of technological development and industrialization dictated that technology became available once the domestic industrial sectors had developed the know-how, manufacturing capabilities, and a thriving domestic market. Once all three of these were established, the industrial sector would develop the technology and reap the economic rewards that came with it in the form of increased output and higher economic growth. Globalization has handed developing countries the technology without any of the economic advantages that come with it. Because the developing nation hasn’t developed it themselves through the establishment of improved manufacturing capabilities and a domestic demand for the technological product, it has no way of leveraging the technology to generate economic growth and development. Technological acquisition in this manner is also highly unequal. In developing nations, only the wealthy, urban populations can generally afford to purchase the new technologies, excluding vast swathes of the rural population from its benefits and fueling inequality.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] It also increases inequality and provides minimal economic benefit.