GLOBALISATION OF BUSINESS, Syed Sajid [reading in the dark .txt] 📗

hires workers as a labour commodity to produce material wealth and boost shareholder profits. Market mechanisms have been utilized in a handful of socialist states, such as China, Yugoslavia and even Cuba to a very limited extent.
It is also possible to envision an economic system based on independent producers, cooperative, democratic worker ownershipand market allocation of final goods and services; the labour-managed market economy is one of several proposed forms ofmarket socialism.


Wide spread programme to de-regulate economies to reform

There is no one in control of the world's economy. And even if there were, there is no set of commonly agreed principles upon which governance could be based. We have some idea about what to do about mitigating the risks of, say, deep sea oil drilling or the overfishing of the oceans. But when it comes to how to organise the vast flows of trade and finance whose relative orderliness and growth are so crucial for prosperity and employment everywhere, there is an intellectual and political vacuum.
It is not as if the issues are unaired. Indeed, at Davos this year – the annual get-together of world political and business leaders that increasingly reminds me of our party conferences in its combination of sonorous speechifying and backstairs wheeler-dealing between alpha males on the make – you could hardly escape talking about them. Whether on the main platform, in the fringe meetings or in the bars, everyone was wringing their hands about too much public and private debt, too much underhand manipulation of exchange rates, whether bankers are right to insist it is back to business as usual and the astonishing rise in food and energy prices.
But if there is lots of talk, there is no agreement on what solid principles and governance are needed to secure change and underpin recovery. The fallback position on which pessimists or optimists can agree is to nod sagely that, confronted by whatever problem, there needs to be better co-ordination. Like apple pie and motherhood, co-ordination is the lowest common denominator to which even the most curmudgeonly Davosian can subscribe, but it raises all the questions. Who is to decide what the problem is and to which a co-ordinated response is required or how the pain should be distributed?
This matters. There are more than 200 million people unemployedworldwide, of whom 78 million are under 24. According to the International Labour Organisation, there are 1.5 billion people in vulnerable employment. The world population is going to rise by another 2 billion in the next 40 years, almost entirely in Asia and Africa. What are they going to eat, drink and do for energy when even current levels of food production, water supply and energy production are inadequate? As Egypt's President Mubarak fights for his political life from street protests fuelled in part by sheer economic desperation, suddenly the questions are no longer for Davos's seminar rooms – they are urgent and real.
Answers will have to encompass what currency the world will use to do its international business in. Currently, this is the dollar – as US treasury secretary John Connally famously said in 1971, our currency but your problem. The US is successfully spending its way out of recession and printing dollars in vast quantities, gloriously indifferent to the impact on all the countries and companies which hold dollars as their reserves. Can this continue? And what would replace the dollar?
Meanwhile, the Chinese are spending their way to yet more economic growth while rigging their exchange rate to boost their exports. I met any number of central bankers and finance ministers here from emerging economies who feel they have to rig their currencies just as the Chinese do, partly because they dare not let the Chinese steal a march on them and partly because they want to follow what seems to be a successful model of economic development. But whatever is unsustainable is sooner or later not sustained and there is a lot of unsustainable activity out there.
Last but not least, there are the super-powerful bankers who are exploiting the vacuum to make their super-profits again, insisting that the crisis is well and truly behind us. There was a lot of shock in Britain recently when Bob Diamond, the new CEO of Barclays, told a parliamentary select committee that the time for remorse from bankers was over. Evidently, he is not alone. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, led the pack at Davos, saying that banker-bashing must now stop and that banks needed to be left free in order to finance recovery. He even had the gall to insist that the main risk to the world economy was government debt and the US's $1.5 trillion budget deficit in particular.
Dimon is right to point to the risk, but criminally wrong to neglect the banks' role in creating the recession, of which the US budget deficit is the consequence, and doubly wrong never to challenge the power of the bond markets and financiers. Yet without a $1.5 trillion US budget deficit and government guarantees to the banking system, there would be no US and world recovery, no world banking system and no cocksure Jamie Dimon. Economist Simon Johnson, formerly chief economist at the IMF, regards him as the most dangerous man in America, ringleader of the intellectual and business forces that have so damaged the world.
Never has the interconnection between raw power and ideas been so obvious. Johnson can detail how every economist who takes a deregulatory, pro big bank line has received fees and income from the banks for his or her work, a stance that hardly wins him many friends. But it is a matter of dismay. It is absolutely obvious that today's banks are far too big, operate with far too little capital and deal in financial instruments that do far too little to finance genuine trade and investment. That is not a view heard in Davos.
Nor is there any compelling blueprint for how to organise the world's financial system any better. There is the world as it is – multiple forms of capitalist economies deploying raw power to do just as they please – and a utopia of freely floating exchange rates, free trade, free financial markets and tightly controlled government budget deficits. The model doesn't exist and even if it did we know enough about modern finance to know it would lead to another disaster. There needs to be a different prospectus that offers principles and governance for this imperfect world as it is.
The French promise action during their presidency of the G20 this year, but I doubt they will manage to move the Davos consensus. Indeed, David Cameron and George Osborne won an extremely warm response here as champions of that same consensus around which they have organised the coalition government's economic policies. Davos is well-meaning; it genuinely wants an inclusive, less unequal, more sustainable world, but balks at willing the means. I have been coming here on and off for more than 20 years and share the view of one battle-hardened veteran British business attendee: on the big calls, Davos is nearly always wrong. In which case, we should all be concerned, not least Mr Cameron, the audience's applause still ringing in his ears.

Regulations in the area of global business environment
The long-delayed clearance for the country’s biggest foreign direct investment project will give a boost to other infrastructure projects
i. In a sluggish retail environment - albeit one in which consumers are more demanding and interactive than ever - Irish companies are starting to realise that they need to manage their customer relationships very carefully indeed.

A new survey from Microsoft has found that seven out of eight companies now have some kind of official ‘‘CRM’’ (customer relationship management) system, even though a significant minority are still managing customer data with systems more suited to managing finances or inventories than people.

The focus on CRM, however, marks a significant change from the last time Microsoft did a survey of this kind, which was five years ago.

Back then, more than half of companies had no CRM system at all.

But 57 per cent of companies in the latest survey said they had invested in CRM in the last three years, while four out of five said they had done so in the last five years.

However, 40 per cent cited as their biggest challenge the difficulty of getting employees to update customer details.

More than 400 companies, most of them small or medium enterprises, were involved in the survey, which is being launched to help publicise a new user-friendly online CRM service from Microsoft.

It’s an unusual offering in that it is suitable for even the smallest company. Hosted by Microsoft, it can be obtained From around ¤30 a month.

Companies can integrate social networking with this CRM system, keeping an eye, not only on customers’ e-mails to them, but also on their tweets and LinkedIn and Facebook postings, insofar as they can be accessed.

‘‘Embrace it, don’t fear it," said Microsoft’s Karl O’Leary, who added that he was well aware of how nervous small business owners could be about new technology. ‘‘But if you don’t confront that fear, it’s going to be very hard to grow your business."

The new online CRM product, he said, was a pragmatic response to what was needed in the market, and would make it more realistic for SMEs to achieve their goals of scaling their businesses globally.

This view was echoed by the Small Firms Association. Its director, Avine McNally, said it was crucial for smaller firms to take a more sophisticated approach to customer relations.

According to McNally, there are still firms for which CRM means keeping notes on scraps of paper. Companies, she said, had to stop regarding CRM as some sort of IT project that had nothing to do with sales and marketing.

‘‘What we say to members is that, if you’re serious about your customers, you have to be serious about CRM too," she said.

Microsoft has produced a report into CRM usage in Ireland, containing contributions from Marketing Institute chief executive Tom Trainor, social media strategist Krishna De and others.

Trainor emphasised the importance of retaining customers in the present business climate, and noted that it was estimated that winning a new customer was five to eight times more expensive than retaining an existing one. ‘‘Farming is always more efficient than hunting," he wrote.

Managing customers meant managing them at every point of interaction, he added. ‘‘Your overall market positioning could be right but, if customer service is slow, it damages your brand," he wrote.

Krishna De noted that, while some Irish companies had looked at social media as a marketing tool, they had not integrated these media with customer support services.

She also said that some global organisations had done precisely this, with Dell, for instance, operating multiple Twitter accounts to cover areas including PR, customer support and sales.

‘‘The first step is to listen to what prospects or customers are saying online about you, your competitors and similar products and services," said De. ‘‘You then need to take the insights . . . and determine when and how you will respond.

This will, in many cases, mean that you need to establish processes and procedures to integrate with your current customer relationship management approach."

III. Forein Direct Investments

Foreign direct investment (FDI) or foreign investment refers to long term participation by country A into country B. It usually involves participation in management, joint-venture, transfer of technology andexpertise. There are two types of FDI: inward foreign direct investment and outward foreign direct investment, resulting in a net FDI inflow (positive or negative) and "stock of foreign direct investment", which is the cumulative number for