the world is not flat: putting globalization in its place

The world is not flat: putting globalization in its place

Susan Christophersona, Harry Garretsenb and Ron Martinc

aDepartment of City and Regional Planning, Cornell University, 129 Sibley, Ithaca, NY 14853,USA. [email protected] of Economics and Business, University of Groningen, PO Box, 800, 9700 AV Groningen,The Netherlands. [email protected] of Geography, University of Cambridge, Downing Place, Cambridge CB2 3EN, [email protected]

Globalization and the ‘flat earthers’

Since the 1990s, the term ‘globalization’ has become

an increasingly prominent feature of economic, so-

cial and political discourse, not just within the aca-

demic community, but also in the popular press and

in the world of policy making. It is, however, a notion

that is far from straightforward. Definitions and

debates have proliferated around the syndrome of

processes and outcomes alleged to characterize

globalization.1 Everyone agrees we live in a more

‘globalized’ world, but views differ as to what this

means and whether it is a trend for good or ill. Those

on the neoliberal right are typically pro-globalization,

arguing that it has opened up markets across the

globe, that it is a force for spreading opportunity

and wealth across nations and that the intensifica-

tion of competition it engenders stimulates innova-

tion and productivity. Those on the political left

tend to be anti-globalization, arguing it is a process

dominated by global corporations that have be-

come more powerful than nation states, that it

increases inequality within advanced economies

and undermines the ability of the world’s poorer

countries to improve social welfare or protect their

natural environment. To this day, debates continue

over the causes, historical antecedents and conse-

quences of globalization (e.g., Crafts and Venables,

2003; Gray, 1998; O’Rourke and Williamson, 1999;

Steingart, 2008; Stiglitz, 2002, 2006; World Bank,

2002, 2008).

One of the contested aspects of globalization

concerns its geographies and especially whether

globalization is rendering the significance of loca-

tion and place redundant and irrelevant. Several

writers have argued that globalization—especially

as driven by the revolution in information and com-

munications technologies (ICT)—marks the ‘end

of geography’ (O’Brien, 1992), the onset of the

‘death of distance’ (Cairncross, 1997), the emer-

gence of a ‘borderless world’ (Ohmae, 1995), of

‘de-territorialization’ or ‘supra-territorialisation’

(Scholte, 2000) and the ‘vanishing of distance’

(Reich, 2001). The most provocative—certainly

the most colourful—of these claims is Thomas

Friedman’s recent pronouncement that as a conse-

quence of globalization, ‘the world is flat’ (Friedman,

2006). He contends that the ICT revolution, the

deregulation of markets by states and increasing

economic integration have contributed to a marked

time–space compression of economic processes. The

alleged result is that there is no longer any ‘friction of

distance’ in economic relationships.

� The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved.For permissions, please email: [email protected]

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It is clearly beyond the purpose of our editorial to

give a full-fledged summary of Thomas Friedman’s

book. Briefly stated, in the The World is FlatFriedman identifies up to 10 structural changes or,

in his terminology, 10 flatteners in the world econ-

omy that have all come into play over the past two

decades (see Table 1). He argues that these changes,

driven by the revolution in information and com-

munications technologies, will ensure that global-

ization will have a ‘flattening’ impact on the world

economy in the years to come:

It is my contention that the fall of the Berlin

Wall, the rise of the PC, Netscape, work flow,

outsourcing, offshoring, uploading, insourcing,

supply-chaining, in-forming, and the steroids

reinforced one another, like complementary

goods. These flattening forces needed time to

start to work together in a mutually enhancing

fashion. That tipping point was reached some-

where around the year 2000 when the ten flat-

teners converged on such a scale and with such

intensity that millions of people on different

continents suddenly started to feel that some-

thing. was new. They couldn’t always de-

scribe quite what was happening, but by 2000

they sensed that they were in touch with people

they’d never been in touch with before, were

being challenged by people who had never chal-

lenged them before, were competing with peo-

ple with whom they had never competed

before. What they were feeling was the flat-

tening of the world. The convergence of the ten

flatteners had created a whole new platform.This platform now operates without regard to

geography, distance, time, and, in the near fu-

ture, even language. Going forward, this plat-

form is going to be at the centre of everything

(Friedman, 2006, p. 205).

The basis of Friedman’s ‘flat world’ thesis,

then, is that there now exists a global information–

communications platform that transcends distance,

place and geography, a platform that connects users

anywhere, irrespective of their location. Yet even if

the world is becoming ‘flatter’ in this sense, it by no

means follows that the global economy more gen-

erally is becoming a flatter landscape. The closest

Friedman comes to acknowledging this is when he

admits that:

not everyone has access to this new platform, this

new playing field.. When I say the world is

being flattened, I don’t mean we are all becoming

equal. What I do mean is that more people in

more places now have the power to access the

flat world platform—to connect, compete, col-

laborate. (Friedman, 2006, pp.205–206).

Beyond this statement, however, Friedman has

relatively little to say about whether the advent of

a ‘flat platform’ is likely to reduce or intensify

socio-economic inequalities among groups, regions

or countries.

Table 1. Friedman’s 10 forces that have ‘flattened’ the world

1. The Fall of the Berlin Wall The beginning of the collapse of communism

2. The World Wide Web The advent of a new age of connectivity

3. Workflow software The integration and standardization of software

4. Uploading Internet-based dissemination of information

5. Outsourcing Of functions to other companies

6. Offshoring Of parts of a business’s operations to overseas locations

7. Supply chaining Horizontal collaboration regardless of borders

8. Insourcing Synchronized commerce solutions

9. In-forming Searching for knowledge

10. The steroids Computing, file-sharing, VoIP, videoconferencing

Source: Friedman (2006), Chapter 2.

Christopherson, Garretsen and Martin

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Globalization and place

In fact, there is a sizable body of opinion and evi-

dence that globalization is not flattening the world

economy but accentuating its unevenness. It is even

arguable whether the global ICT ‘platform’, as

Friedman calls it, is itself flat. Indeed, both the ar-

chitecture and the flows of Internet and telephonic

communication are highly spatially skewed and

concentrated, being overwhelmingly focussed on

and dominated by major ‘global’ cities (see, e.g.

www.telegeography.com). In this respect, not all

socio-economic groups or local communities have

equal access to or control over this platform. Be-

yond this, what matters is whether there are forces

that channel the benefits of access to and use of

this platform disproportionately to particular socio-

economic groups and particular places (cities, regions

and countries). Even having equal access to a ubiqui-

tous and flat ICT ‘playing field’ does not imply an

equal outcome among the ‘players’—firms, work-

ers, cities, regions and countries—in terms of

wealth creation, prosperity and welfare. And some

actors and networks have more access to informa-

tion than others (Leamer and Storper, 2001, Storper

and Venables, 2004). Key factors determining the

production of wealth (investment capital, innova-

tion capacity, talented labour) are still very un-

evenly distributed among places. Indeed, those

who contest the world is flat hypothesis claim that

the geography of the global economy contains a dy-

namic of centralization and agglomeration as well

as one of dispersion. These authors claim that the

spatial agglomeration of economic activity, includ-

ing key businesses, talented labour and innovation

and creativity, is actually increasing and that the

global economy is now being driven by key cities

and mega city-regions (Sassen, 2000). According to

these observers, rather than becoming ‘flatter’, the

global economic landscape is becoming ‘lumpier’.

Further, while globalization has enabled and in-

volved the rapid rise of new national economies

(notably in the BRIC countries), it has simulta-

neously exposed other countries to worsening pov-

erty (Stiglitz, 2002, 2006; World Bank, 2002).

Though geographers have been slow to enter into

the debates surrounding globalization (Dicken,

2004), they consistently emphasize that it is inher-

ently spatially uneven both with respect to its

causes and motive forces and its implications for

places, regions and countries (Harvey, 2006).

There is, then, an important debate to be had as to

whether, and to what extent, the sort of processes

identified by Friedman as ‘flatteners’ are promoting

the spatial concentration or dispersion of economic

growth and wealth. As Leamer (2007) rightly

stresses in his extensive review of Friedman’s book,

the claim (or slogan) that the ‘world is flat’ un-

doubtedly has a deliberately contentious geograph-

ical ring to it.2 Leamer acknowledges that the

revolutions in ICT and related systems of socio-

economic interaction and exchange increase the

freeness of trade and promote the production and

transmission of information and knowledge. In

short, they increase economic integration. Yet, as

Leamer demonstrates, it is possible, analytically, to

show that increasing economic integration can lead

to spatial agglomeration of economic activity rather

than to a geographically ‘flatter’ pattern. For their

part, while accepting that the process of globaliza-

tion may annihilate space and distance, economic

geographers argue that it also heightens the role

played by ‘place’ and especially place-specific

socio-cultural-

institutional factors (including face-to-face contact,

localized social networks of knowledge spillover

and other ‘untraded interdependencies’) in fostering

and sustaining the spatial agglomeration of economic

activities—particularly the creative and cultural in-

dustries that now dominate our major cities. In a sim-

ilar vein, Porter (1998) has argued that in the global

economy, competitive advantage is becoming more

rather than less place dependent:

In a global economy—which boasts rapid trans-

portation, high speed communications and acces-

sible markets—one would expect location to

diminish in importance. But the opposite is true.

The enduring competitive advantages in a global

economy are often heavily localised, arising

from concentrations of highly specialised skills

and knowledge, institutions, rivalry, related

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businesses, and sophisticated customers (Porter,

1998, p. 90).

From a theoretical perspective, a priori it is not

clear how the ‘flatteners’ that Friedman talks about

will affect the growth and allocation of economic

activity across space. In modern location theory of

the sort found in the so-called ‘new economic ge-

ography’ (new spatial economics), the answer to

the question of how innovations and changes in

organizational behaviour like those enumerated

by Friedman will change the economic geography

in the real world is that ‘it depends’. It depends on

the exact nature of the changes concerned, the

(initial) level of economic integration, the initial

spatial configuration of the economic landscape

and the geographical scale being considered.

Globalization as approximated by increasing eco-

nomic integration can lead to a more agglomerated

or uneven world as well as to more spreading or

a more even spatial distribution of economic ac-

tivity (Baldwin, 2006; Crafts and Venables, 2003;

Krugman and Venables, 1995). Interestingly,

however, most such models tend to predict a geo-

graphically uneven outcome. And at the other the-

oretical extreme, invoking the theoretical

apparatus of (Marxian) political economy, geogra-

phers such as Harvey (2006) see no reason why the

increasing integration and interconnectedness of

the world economy should change the historical,

law-like tendency for capitalism to develop un-

evenly geographically:

Reducing the friction of distance, in short,

makes capital more rather than less sensitive

to local geographical variations. The combined

effect of freer trade and reduced transport costs

is not greater equality of power through the

evolving territorial division of labour, but grow-

ing geographical inequalities (Harvey, 2006,

pp. 100–101).

This seems to echo a similar point made earlier

by Gray, albeit from a different ideological-cum-

theoretical position, in his critical account of glob-

alization thinking:

[globalisation] does not require that economic

life throughout the world be equally and inten-

sively integrated. A universal state of equal in-

tegration in world-wide economic activity is

precisely what globalisation is not. On the con-

trary, the increased interconnection of economic

activity throughout the world accentuates uneven

development. (Gray, 1998, pp. 55–56).


This issue of the Cambridge Journal of Regions,Economic and Society brings together several

papers stemming from various disciplines that,

while differing in their specific focus, take up the

issue of the continuing importance of location and

place in a globalizing world. What they show is that

the terrain of wealth creation, innovation and trade

remains distinctly ‘bumpy’. The papers argue that

flatness is not the inevitable outcome of the forces

that are driving the globalization process. To create

some common ground, all the papers took Thomas

Friedman’s highly influential book The World isFlat as their point of departure. In doing so, and

despite being critical of the book, the authors ac-

knowledge that Friedman’s central arguments call

for a serious response. What distinguishes this issue

special is the breadth and (spatial) scope of the

analyses. This not only applies to the analytical

frameworks and methodologies used, ranging from

international economics, urban and regional eco-

nomics, economic geography and Marxist political

economy, but also applies to the spatial scales cov-

ered (global, national, regional, urban) and the rich-

ness of the examples and empirical material

deployed.

Based on both theory and empirics, most of the

authors in this issue turn Friedman’s flat hypothe-

sis on its head and argue that it is as likely or even

more likely that globalization will lead to a more

‘spiky’ or ‘bumpy’ world: spiky, in the sense that

at various spatial scales the geographical alloca-

tion of economic activity is likely to become

more uneven and more differentiated. This predic-

tion is not only made at the global level with


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respect to between-country unevenness but also

with respect to inequalities and disparities among

city-regions.

The first three papers deal with the theoretical

foundations (or the lack thereof) of the world is flat

thesis. McCann (2008) carefully discusses how this

hypothesis should be seen from the perspective of

location theory and dismisses the claim that the

forces mentioned by Friedman could only work in

the direction of rendering geography less important.

There are sound theoretical arguments to conclude

that both a more even and an uneven spatial allo-

cation are possible: it indeed depends. McCann (see

also McCann, 2005) also points out that one should

be very careful in distinguishing among various al-

leged structural changes: while the actual transport

costs of shipping goods or information may have

fallen spectacularly, this is not necessarily true for

the transaction costs involved in making or setting up

a transaction. Rodriguez-Pose and Crescenzi (2008)

come to similar conclusions. They survey and dis-

cuss modern location theory to see whether and how

the flat prediction can be backed by theory. In the

end, the authors conclude that such a theoretical

foundation is hard to come by. The third paper by

Cox (2008) approaches the topic from a somewhat

different angle. Applying a Marxist-inclined political

economy perspective, Cox casts the flatteners iden-

tified by Friedman within a long-term analysis where

globalization and its drivers are seen as the latest

phase in a never-ending attempt by capital in order

to use space in new-and uneven - ways in order to

sustain profitable accumulation.

The remaining four papers, though not ignoring

theory, explicitly or implicitly take on Friedman’s

challenge that the world is flat by looking at the

empirical evidence. They do so for different spatial

scales and locations. Brakman and Van Marrewijk

(2008) look at the flat-world hypothesis from the

point of view of the global economy. They do not

find much evidence of economic convergence be-

tween countries at the global level. In addition, they

do not find that the importance of distance in cross-

country economic relationships is falling over time.

The most prominent relationship in this respect is

(bilateral) international trade. Linders et al. (2008)

also show that distance, ranging from physical to

mental distance, remains important, as well as dem-

onstrating that despite the revolution in communi-

cations, many countries still do not trade with each

other at all. Their message is that large parts of the

world economy are still rather ‘empty’. Switching

to regions, Florida et al. (2008) use a new, if pro-

vocative, data technique to show how the new

global economy consists of a fairly limited num-

ber of mega-regions that make up for the bulk of

the globe’s GDP, population and employment.

These regions often include (parts of) different

countries and their rise not only suggests that

the world is becoming more spiky (instead of flat)

but also poses important questions about (re-

gional) economic policy. The final paper by Van

der Ploeg and Poelhekke (2008) moves attention

to mega-cities and to urban growth, particularly

in the developing world. Here too, and in line

with recent evidence by the World Bank (2008),

the dominant trend is one of increased urbaniza-

tion: the integration of developing countries into

the world economy seems to go along with a sharp

increase in the degree of spatial unevenness

within such nations.

After reading the seven papers that make up

this issue of the Cambridge Journal of Regions,Economic and Society, one could argue that there

are two basic and very fundamental problems with

Friedman’s book. And this criticism also applies to

other ‘death of distance’ claims that foretell the end

of (economic) geography. The first problem is

a conceptual or theoretical one. The notion that

the changes or flatteners identified by Friedman

naturally lead to a flat or geography-free world is

misleading. It is very much an open question what

the impact of these changes will be. The second and

related problem is that systematic empirical evi-

dence is needed to back up Friedman’s claims,

but the book simply does not provide this kind of

evidence. Taken together, the papers in this issue of

the journal go to the heart of this criticism by

addressing both problems. Having said this, the

goal is not debunk Friedman’s ideas outright. On

the contrary, as stated above, his is an important

book that calls for a serious response. Many of


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the changes and forces that are emphasized

throughout The World is Flat are clearly very rele-

vant and pose important (new) challenges for

researchers and policy makers. Friedman is correct,

for example when he points out the importance of

changes like the rise of India or China, the spatial

fragmentation of the production process through

offshoring or the lowering of transaction costs that

makes more and more services tradable. Rather, the

message that comes through from the contributions

that follow is two-fold: Friedman is wrong to equate

the emergence of a world of increasing inter-

connectedness with a ‘flat’ global economy and

the empirical evidence does not in any case back

up the idea that the global economy is becoming

flat.

Endnotes

1 In many ways ‘globalization’ is an archetypal ‘fuzzy’ or

‘chaotic’ concept, used in different ways by different

authors and conflating several different processes and

outcomes. It is often as much a rhetoric device as it is

an analytical concept. Such fuzzy concepts abound in the

social sciences, two other prominent examples being the

notions of ‘cluster’ and ‘regional competitiveness (see

Markusen, 2003; Martin and Sunley, 2003).2 Of course, the very title of the book, one assumes, was

intended to be sensationalist, as is often the case with

journalistic ‘airport’ books. Friedman’s sequel, Hot, Flatand Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution, andHow it can Renew America (2008), is in the same genre.

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the world is not flat: putting globalization in its place

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