For the rest of us, it is the fact that when we travel we see the same brands, sold in more or less the same way, the world over. For the British government it is important enough an issue, which led to the publication of a White Paper in December, in which Clare Short, the international development secretary, declares that the forces of globalisation can be harnessed for the benefit of the world's disadvantaged. This is no academic question. For globalisation's advocates and for its critics, the focus has been on a modern US economic miracle, in which technologically-driven productivity growth and openness to trade have gone hand in hand. Both could be extremely vulnerable to a hard landing in America.
Globalisation is one of the characteristics of our age.
The process is driven by technological advances and reductions in the costs of international transactions, which speed technology and ideas, raise the share of trade in world production and increase the mobility of capital. The practical manifestations of globalisation are annual growth in world trade of two or three times' the growth in gross domestic product - in other words economies that are increasingly open to trade. Even more important, as we shall see, has been the sharp rise in international capital flows. Every so often a new phenomenon comes along, something that has never happened before. So it is with globalisation, but it is not that new a phenomenon.