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Abstract

Many political discussions share a common understanding of a rapidly changing world. A global market economy is seen to pose new demands for national markets and is expected to increase the international competition concerning locational factors. Globalization is the keyword of this debate. It describes an economic process that results from changes in the investment, production and distribution decisions made by individual firms and households. Unfortunately, the term globalization can mean different things to different people. Some observers define globalization as market integration (Frieden/ Rogowski 1997); others refer to the internationalization of production processes (Pauly/ Reich 1997; Archibugi / Michie 1998). Though the two concepts arc not mutually exclusive, they neither share a common definition nor do they examine the same processes. Whereas from the macroeconomic perspective ofJeff Frieden and Ronald Rogowski (1997), evidence for a globalizing or even a globalizcd world economy is to be found in the convergence of prices for goods, capital and services, the approach of Daniele Archibugi and Jonathan Michie (1998) regards globalization as a consequence of the growing number of transnational companies. In this paper we concentrate exclusively on the latter perspective and analyze globalization on a sectoral and systemic level. The information that allows us to trace globalization involves sector-specific trade flows, which are available for a period of fourteen years. Network visualizations, a technique that we illustrate more closely in the following section, also help to describe the structural change to the world trade in automobiles on the systemic level.