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describes an ongoing process by which regional economies, societies, and cultures have become integrated through a globe-spanning network of exchange

Global Crossing Limited is a telecommunications company that provides computer networking services worldwide. It maintains a large backbone and offers transit and peering links, VPN, leased lines, audio and video conferencing, long distance telephone, managed services, dialup, colocation and VoIP, to customers ranging from individuals to large enterprises and to other carriers. The main emphases are on higher margin layered services like managed services and VoIP with leased lines. Global Crossing is a tier 1 carrier.

Global Crossing was founded by Gary Winnick and three business associates in 1997 through Pacific Capital Group, Winnick's personal venture group, which had experienced mixed results in its twelve-year history. In 1997, Global Crossing raised $35 million of capital from the CIBC Argosy Merchant Funds (later Trimaran Capital Partners). The heads of the CIBC Argosy Merchant funds were former associates of Winnick from his days in the 1980s as a salesman at Drexel Burnham Lambert under Michael Milken. CIBC would ultimately realize a gain estimated to be $2 billion from its relatively small equity investment in Global Crossing, making it one of the most profitable investments by a financial institution in the 1990s.[

The Lexus and the Olive Tree is a 1999 book by Thomas L. Friedman that posits that the world is currently undergoing two struggles: the drive for prosperity and development, symbolized by the Lexus, and the desire to retain identity and traditions, symbolized by the olive tree. He says he came to this realization while eating a sushi box lunch on a Japanese bullet train after visiting a Lexus factory and reading an article about conflict in the Middle East. Friedman leads the reader on an international quest for a new understanding of the often misunderstood and misapplied term "globalization" by tapping on to stories of his actual experiences in interfacing with many of the global movers and shakers. He proposes that "globalization is not simply a trend or fad but is, rather, an international system. It is the system that has replaced the old Cold War system, and, like that Cold War System, globalization has its own rules and logic that today directly or indirectly influence the politics, environment, geopolitics and economics of virtually every country in the world."

Globalization is a process of interaction and integration among the people, companies, and governments of different nations, a process driven by international trade and investment and aided by information technology. This process has effects on the environment, on culture, on political systems, on economic development and prosperity, and on human physical well-being in societies around the world. Globalization is not new, though. For thousands of years, people—and, later, corporations—have been buying from and selling to each other in lands at great distances, such as through the famed Silk Road across Central Asia that connected China and Europe during the Middle Ages. Likewise, for centuries, people and corporations have invested in enterprises in other countries. In fact, many of the features of the current wave of globalization are similar to those prevailing before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.

come right to the main point of this review: Thomas Friedman's brilliant catch phase, book title and powerfully developed new thesis — "The World is Flat" — is yet another reaffirmation of what Bahá'u'lláh said about 150 years ago when He declared that “The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.” That's not to say there is nothing new in Mr. Friedman's latest book. The World Is Flat is a wide-ranging examination of how trends and technologies like freedom, the Internet, and open-source software are converging to make it possible for educated people everywhere to compete with the best and the brightest in North America and Europe . And that is changing everything, for people everywhere, much more quickly than had been previously imagined. Mr. Friedman, a Pulitzer prize-winning columnist for the New York Times , says the convergence of these trends and technologies is “flattening” the world. They create a “level playing field” where companies and individuals now successfully compete in the global market regardless of location. Mr. Friedman is by now an acknowledged expert on globalization, having outlined its impact in his 1999 book The Lexus and the Olive Tree . There he argued that globalization had become “the dominant international system at the end of the twentieth century — replacing the Cold War system…”

globalization restrains governments by inducing increased budgetary pressure. As a consequence, governments shift their expenditures in favour of transfers and subsidies and away from capital expenditures. This expenditure shift is potentially enhanced by citizens’ preferences to be compensated for the risks of globalization (“compensation hypothesis”). Employing two different datasets and various measures of globalization, we analyze whether globalization has indeed influenced the composition of government expenditures.

has sharply influenced the evolution of world

generally defined as the growth of systems and activities of economic and commercial production, trade, and services on a global scale

the process of globalization has progressed

Some effects of globalization: The United States is the center of globalization trends – we drive most of the world’s economy, influence international policy, and financial transactions. The prime paradigm is capitalism – a faithful reliance on the market to drive decisions. Global forces like the World Bank promote decentralization and privatization.  Governments get out of the way, leave services to private groups. Inherent in capitalism is an unequal distribution of wealth. Having wealth generates more wealth, having no resources leaves countries at a severe disadvantage. Technology is one kind of resource and wealth. Countries that have technology, use it to develop new products, markets, ideas… and financial power.

What are globalization effects on Education (in the U.S.) Heightened competition between nations to develop an educated labor force; nations need a competitive niche. Education is seen as a mechanical process – develop basic skills, technical skills, competitive skills. Movements like standards and testing develop from this view of education. The cultural philosophy of capitalism, decentralization, and privatization manifest in strategies such as independent schools, charter schools, and vouchers. Higher education (colleges and universities) are more closely tied to the private sector – it is a necessary reality. Technology is seen as a key area for education, but how is technology important? View 1 -People trained directly in the hard sciences and technology fields contribute to those lucrative markets. View 2 – Information technologies impact how people work, play, gain information, and participate in communities. Those who can use IT to further their own aims win out, those without access or skills lose out in the new world.

Connecting Cultures For the same reasons but in a far different environment, social studies teacher Suzie Nestico oversees a project that involves 14 schools and nearly 400 students in Australia, Canada, England, Germany, South Korea, and the United States. She teaches students in grades 10 through 12 at the 900-student Mount Carmel Area High School in Mount Carmel, Pa. See Also On-Demand Webinar: E-Learning Goes Global From professional development for teachers in China to the use of mobile technology to bring new learning opportunities to remote villages in Africa, e-learning is bringing advanced courses, expert teachers, and an awareness of life in other countries to students around the globe. • View this on-demand webinar. “We’re a small, rural town of 6,000 with ultra-conservative family values and viewpoints, and most of our students have never gone anywhere else,” said Ms. Nestico, the project manager for the Flat Classroom Project, an international collaborative effort that links classrooms around the globe. She also built a course called 21st Century Global Studies that started this academic year. The course is for students in grades 10 through 12 who, through project- and inquiry-based assignments such as editing wiki pages, learn that working collaboratively with other cultures—an increasingly marketable skill—can be challenging. “It’s a big shift for them to go from ‘me’ to ‘we,’ ” she said. “I can’t help but think that the more kids we involve in projects like this, the more we start to break down some of this sense of entitlement” that exists among students in the United States. “Just imagine if you wrote 200 words on your wiki page, and when you went back the next day, you saw that students in Korea had changed a couple of your sentences because they thought it sounded better another way,” Ms. Nestico said. “There are a lot of sighs at first, and it’s a messy process, but it’s very much worth doing. This is where we truly push learning to the highest level.” Some lessons have less to do with a final grade than with understanding that a simple phrase in one culture can easily be misperceived in another. When a student in California posted an online request last summer for information about a “flash mob,” for example, a teacher from Germany immediately jumped in to write that European students couldn’t even talk about such a thing because of the London riots. And two years ago, during an education-related trip to Mumbai, India, Ms. Nestico had to nix any exclamatory T-shirts that might offend the local residents, such as “Holy cow!,” because cows are considered sacred animals in India.