Global Trends Blog

The Yale Center for the Study of Globalization through its YaleGlobal online service has just launched an ebook A World Connected: Globalization in the 21st Century which is well worth the read for anyone interested in how globalization has – and will in future – impact our world, lives and work.  It’s a seminal collection of essays collated from over ten years of work by scholars, practitioners, politicians, and experts in the study of globalization. 

One of its most compelling points is its broad scope, covering the complex array of ways in which globalization is changing our world – often discussions of globalization narrow in to areas of economics and trade, or to the global capital markets which have had such an impact in recent years, or to the geopolitics of a new world order. With the notions of interconnectedness and interdependence as its lenses, the book not only explores these topics, but also the many ways in which globalization touches all of our lives and interweaves communities, countries and continents – including how cultures and societies develop, how we seek security, how ideas moving around the world are impacting creativity, how rising inequalities are changing societies, how China’s rise is impacting the world, and how we as people interact around the world.

Natasha Deonarain, MD, MBA is a board-certified family practice and urgent care physician with 20 years of experience in both Canada and the United States. In her upcoming book, The 7 Principles of Health: Your Call to Health Consciousness, she talks about a new paradigm for optimal health that’s based on a different paradigm than that used in Western medicine. Natasha kindly shares her thoughts on how the US healthcare system needs to – and can become – more patient-centric.

To see where America’s healthcare future lies, we should take a few lessons from the book and music industries.

Ashley Halligan, of Software Advice, recently reported on innovative sustainability efforts across the globe – in some surprising places.  But perhaps we should not be so surprised. Making the best of our environment and the resources we have available is a critical need everywhere – and even more so for communities facing challenges such as health hazards from waste and violence.  Ashley kindly shares a summary of four innovative efforts in this guest blog, in Medellin (Colombia), Naples (Italy), Songdo (South Korea), and Philadelphia.

Medellin, historically-labeled as a violent, drug-ridden mecca, has made incredible progress in developing public transport systems, including the installation of an innovative series of escalators connecting its poorest neighborhood to the city center, which has been credited with helping to reduce crime in the area.

It did not escape the notice of my partner as we walked down Nathan Road in Hong Kong that the local couple ahead of us were carrying a plethora of bags from Gucci, Chanel and a host other top designers, while our bag bore the Chinese logo of one of the local emporiums. Having sought out in vain the great local goods and technology deals we used to find here just a few years ago, we had reluctantly came to the conclusion that we were standing in the next great bastion of high end consumerism.  Gone are many local shops and outlets, replaced by designer names on every corner and giant shopping malls that offer soft music, stores-in-stores and richly designed aesthetics.  Just like you would find in New York, Paris, London or Tokyo – only more expensive in many cases! With 10 Gucci stores/stores-in-stores in Hong Kong (home to 7 million people), the density of stores per capita is already higher than in London or Tokyo.  

The headlines have been full of numbers recently, particularly as we have just passed a milestone where the 7 billionth person has now joined the world’s population (give or take a few million and a few months either way).  So let’s start there in terms of looking at some important numbers that will impact the world in the next decades.

1.  7 billion: The world’s (estimated) population at the end of 2011