Article Preview
Top1. Introduction
A change in trade regime always precedes a change in the mode of production. The Fordist mode of production that introduced the world with the assembly line mode of production dominated the world for more than seventy years. However, it was augmented by cheaper availability of information at the end of the eighties of the last millennium, following the microelectronic revolution and a deregulatory regime that was paved bythe Uruguay round and GATT negotiations (Goddard & Gillespie, 1986; Garnham, 1990; Hepworth, 1989). Harvey (1989, 1990) illustrated it as time-space convergence, and Poster (1990) moved a step forward to portray it as an electronic revolution that changed both what to know and how do we know that. This sudden emergence of and shift to an informational mode of production (Castells, 1992) succeeded a series of crisis that started with thefall of the Bretton-Wood system and Japanese automobile companies’ discovery of the US market, that marked the end of worldwide industrial hegemony of USA (United States of America).
Further to this,the worldwide transition from fixed to floating exchange rates and the Organisation of petroleum-producing countries’ (OPEC) crisis from 1973 to 1980, which released$375 billion Petro-dollars and threw the West into the cocoon of a recession and stagflation,may be considered as some of those evil necessities. Debt dependence of the third world went to an all-time high, and depending upon debt instead of equity became a usual trend(Corbridge, 1984). On the other side of the Pacific,a war-devastated Japan restructured itself and became the new financial pivot of the world (Vogel, 1986), and the Euro market flourished more than ever before (Pecchioli, 1983; Walter, 1988). All these further molded by the weakening of the historically industrialized nations such asthe USA and UK (United Kingdom), and the concurrent rise of Japan from Asia, and Germany from Europe, to fill that gap. The role of the Thatcherite and Reaganite administrationstowards these transformations deserves special attention. Computerization of commerce and production brought parity in their operation, and that reduced the inventory cost to a great extent through the 'in the time inventory system.' The agents of modern production, commerce, and trade, the multinational corporations,showed great flexibility to explore and operate beyond the existing boundaries of time and space. Their success ushered in the change from state monopolies to Globalization (Graham et al., 1988). Finally, the titan of state monopoly, Soviet Russia inclusive of the Soviet bloc faltered and put the final nail on the coffin of the static world to embrace dynamism. All these would have been fruitless without the integration of the global financial system, but the aforementioned revolutionary changes in the global telecommunication system facilitated such integration (Marshall, 1987). The stage was ready for the redefining ofthe Ricardian comparative advantage, and the precondition of such a significant change is to implementthe contemporary shift in data regime together withamplified telecommunication capability (Gillespie and Williams, 1988). By this time, the changes of data from analog to digital, made computer service, and telecommunication complementary to each other.