Global Business Environment

Without a doubt, the world economy has experienced significant shifts over the last 30 years. There used to be isolated barriers for trades and investments within countries due to different legal restrictions and limited resources to reach out to neighbouring countries. With the help of technology advancements, all these restrictions and limitation have been minimised over the last 30 years. Major advances in transportation, telecommunication and information processing have brought the world closer together not only for trades and investments but also in many ways. Countries around the world simplify most of the barriers to trade by imposing legal agreements, contracts and emergence of Global Institutions. The shift towards a more integrated and interdependent world economy nowadays is what we call globalisation (Hill 2014).

Globalisation has caused the dominance of companies from the U.S to slowly diminished (Kappel 2011), while smaller firms can no longer ignore the opportunities to go beyond borders to trade and source internationally. Things have changed especially the rise of multinational enterprise from developing countries (Hill 2014). Multinational enterprise is any business that has productive activities in two or more countries (Studymoose 2016). Many countries and economies have realised that they cannot make it on their own due to high competitions. These demographics changed rather show the growing opportunities for international businesses for countries like China and Japan. Since the 1960s, there has been the rise of non-U.S. multinational enterprises. One of those significant non-U.S. multinational enterprise is mainly from the Japanese (Hill 2014). Therefore, another notable trend is the rapid growing number of mini-multinational. The final shift in the world economy was caused when the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe and the republics of the former Soviet Union (Kappel 2011). Former Communist nations of Europe and Asia that have been