How unrelated events can lead to unintended barriers to trade?

We live in a world with many and different cultures and in which each country has their own political arrangements and governments and, consequently, their own internal policies and regulations. Political instability, crime, illegal migration, food prices, monetary policies and safety regulation are factors that lead to unintended barriers to trade, affecting various countries and companies who depend on their daily exportation/importation.

There are also other unrelated events such natural disasters or war on terror. In these cases, nations and most important, companies who depends on their daily production should be prepare and have other options worldwide, such as having plants in other countries and not be dependent on their production in only one territory. As an example for this case was the Japanese Earthquake where many companies had to shut down temporarily their plants due to the disaster occur in the country. This affected their market share and most important their revenue.

Along the time, there will be unintended barriers due to so many changes in an economic, cultural and political manner between nations. It is important that companies and countries have multiple options to trade worldwide so that these unintended barriers don’t affect them in a drastically way.

“Globalization Drives Changes for U.S. Automakers"

The payment of healthcare from U.S businesses will always be an important factor and benefit for U.S. employees. On the other hand, it could also negatively affect the comparative advantage of companies when it comes to increase the cost of each vehicle. Meaning that this could put ahead foreign companies in their market share.

In this case, U.S. car manufacture has a disadvantage due to the huge amount of money they are investing in healthcare, rather than investing it in other methods that can give the company the opportunity to grow and be more innovated. They should have a balance between labor costs and pensions they offer to their employees in order to maintain a competitive cost to their customers.

It’s certainly obvious that not only healthcare and high wages affected negatively the comparative advantage of U.S car manufacture. There are a variety of factors that the Big Three are not applying in other to compete with foreign companies such as: innovation on their processes to motivate employees at lower cost, diversification of their products and internal methods in order to be more productive.

We live in a highly competitive age, where everything is about who is the best, who is first, and where each day companies create new policies to increase their market share and revenue. Competition between nations will develop over the time and new policies will be improve and others will be enacted.

To conclude, companies should take advantage of new technologies and be creative in order to maintain their position in todays globalized world.

How open to openness are you?

Today we are in a such globalized and interdependent world where we are exposed to so many goods and services that give each country the opportunity to grow in an economic, cultural and technological way.  Developing countries should take advantage of these variety of goods and services in order to increase their local productions and markets  and become  more competitive.

On the other hand, it is very important that countries, mainly developing countries, establish restrictions and  processes to import and export. They should be aware to supply their own country first (with quality and quantity) in order to export national products, and give the opportunity to local companies to expose their products nationally and worldwide. Also, there are many other factors that must be considered such as technology, prices,  and competition.

To finalize, I am open to openness but there must be processes that should be completed and respected in order to export and import products.