2005 | 2010 | 2016a | |
Africa | 2% | 10% | 25% |
Americas | 36% | 49% | 65% |
Arab States | 8% | 26% | 42% |
Asia and Pacific | 9% | 23% | 42% |
Commonwealth of Independent States |
10% |
34% |
67% |
Europe | 46% | 67% | 79% |
a Estimate. Source: International Telecommunications Union. |
Globalization or globalisation (see spelling differences) is the process of international integration arising from the interchange of world views, products, ideas, and other aspects of culture. Advances in transportation (such as the steam locomotive, steamship, jet engine, and container ships) and in telecommunications infrastructure (including the rise of the telegraph and its modern offspring, the Internet and mobile phones) have been major factors in globalization, generating further interdependence of economic and cultural activities. Though many scholars place the origins of globalization in modern times, others trace its history long before the European Age of Discovery and voyages to the New World, some even to the third millennium BC. Large-scale globalization began in the 19th century. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, the connectivity of the world's economies and cultures grew very quickly., The term globalization is recent, only establishing its current meaning in the 1970s. In 2000, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) identified four basic aspects of globalization: trade and transactions, capital and investment movements, migration and movement of people, and the dissemination of knowledge. Further, environmental challenges such as global warming, cross-boundary water and air pollution, and overfishing of the ocean are linked with globalization. Globalizing processes affect and are affected by business and work organization, economics, socio-cultural resources, and the natural environment. Academic literature commonly subdivides globalization into three major areas: economic globalization, cultural globalization, and political globalization.