The Great Convergence Quotes

“The upward spiral was checked from the mid-1980s and reversed around 1990. For the last couple of decades, the G7 share has been torqueing downward at a mighty pace. Today it is back to the level that it first attained at the very beginning of the nineteen century.”
― Richard Baldwin, The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization

“From 1990, the trend flipped; a century’s worth of rich nations’ rise has been reversed in just two decades. Their share is now back to where it was in 1914. This trend, which might be called the “Great Convergence,” is surely the dominant economic fact of the last two or three decades. It is the origin of much of the anti-globalization sentiment in rich nations, and much of the new assertiveness of “emerging markets.”
― Richard Baldwin, The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization

“But the rapid industrializers did not industrialize as the G7 nations had done. They did not build up domestic know-how and put together domestic supply chains to become competitive. The I6 became competitive abroad by joining regional production networks.3”
― Richard Baldwin, The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization

“The second unbundling changed technology boundaries. Technology became less defined by national borders and more defined by the contours of international production networks. The resulting gush of know-how from the North to the South has begun to re-equilibrate the knowledge imbalances that had been created during the Great Divergence. The result, as argued in the text, was rapid industrialization and growth take-offs in a handful of developing nations.”
― Richard Baldwin, The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization

“Since we are messaging with far more people than we used to when messaging meant airmail or phone calls, we have an incentive to meet more people.”
― Richard Baldwin, The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization

“To put it sharply, reducing the cost of moving goods while the cost of moving ideas remained high was the root cause of the “Great Divergence.”
― Richard Baldwin, The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization

“Given the high cost of moving ideas, the resulting spatial dispersion of production dampened innovation—both on the demand side and supply side.”
― Richard Baldwin, The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization

“the chapter explains the three-cascading-constraints perspective by walking through, in sequence, the situation where all three constraints were binding (before 1820), the situation where only two were binding (up to 1990), and finally, today’s situation where only one is binding.”
― Richard Baldwin, The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization

“The Uruguay Round lasted from 1986 to 1994. As Figure 22 shows, the really original element in this phase was the rapid tariff cutting by poor nations. It is important to note, however, that this developing-nation liberalization had nothing to do with the GATT since the “don’t obey, don’t object” principle was still in operation. Instead, these reductions were the beginning of a revolution in developing-nation attitudes that are really part of Phase Four and the effort by poor nations to attract offshore factories and jobs (as will be discussed in Chapter 3).”
― Richard Baldwin, The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization

“By relaxing the constraints that had underpinned the vast imbalances in the global distribution of knowledge, the ICT revolution unleashed a historic transformation that might be called the Great Convergence.”
― Richard Baldwin, The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization

“Or to use the unbundling theme, globalization’s third unbundling is likely to allow labor services to be physically unbundled from laborers.”
― Richard Baldwin, The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization