A global economy is a dream come true for multi-national corporations. It means they can acquire services and manufacturing from countries that offer the absolute lowest labor costs on the planet. The human rights and environmental issues that prevail in said countries never enter the picture.
There is, however, one significant implication of a global economy that everyone needs to be aware of. The standard of living among all participating countries will eventually and inevitably reach a point of equilibrium. That will happen simply because competition will force the income of those in the richer countries (the US in particular) to decline while the income of those in the emerging countries will rise.
Consider that if someone in the US earns $20 per hour to provide a service or manufacture a product and someone in China, India, or Mexico performs the same service or manufactures the same product for $1.00 per hour, the laws of economics indicate that the US worker will have to take a pay cut to deter the exportation of their job. At the same time, an increase in demand will cause the pay rate in the competing countries to increase. Eventually, all pay rates will stabilize a some point in between the two original rates. For instance the pay rate of the US worker may be $10.00 per hour and that of the worker in the competing country will end up at $10.00 per hour as well.
At that time, there would be little economic incentive to export more jobs to foreign countries but the damage will have already been done and there will be few decent jobs left in the US. The worker in the US that refuses to work for such compensation will find themselves unemployed while the worker in the foreign country will be more than happy to find such an opportunity.
Personally, I suspect I'll survive this impending disaster but the next generation that is coming into the job market will surely be totally decimated.
