Product Description

Nation states, asserts the world-renowned business strategist Kenichi Ohmae, are dinosaurs waiting to die. In this profoundly important book Ohmae argues that not only have nation states lost their ability to control exchange rates and protect their currencies, but they no longer generate real economic activity. As a result, he maintains, they have already forfeited their role as critical participants in the global economy. Once efficient engines of wealth creation, nation states today have become inefficient engines of wealth distribution, whose fates are increasingly determined by economic choices made elsewhere.

Ohmae contends that four great forces -- capital, corporations, consumers, and communication -- have combined to usurp the economic power once held by the nation state. In the first full-scale analysis of this global phenomenon, Ohmae explains exactly how communications now control the movement of capital and corporations across national borders, how demanding consumers determine the flow of goods and services, and how harmful government policies are increasingly disciplined by the actions of informed consumers, profit-seeking corporations, and currency markets.

Old habits die hard and the habits of power die hardest of all. While governments cling to jingoistic celebrations of nationhood that place far more value on emotion-grabbing symbols than on the welfare of their citizens, Ohmae reveals that within their borders a revolution has been born. He documents how affluent economic zones forming natural "business units" have arisen throughout the world, bringing real, concrete improvements in the quality of life. These new engines of prosperity, which Ohmae calls region states, have emerged, for example, between San Diego and Tijuana, Singapore and parts of Malaysia and Indonesia, Silicon Valley and the Bay Area, and Hong Kong and the adjacent portion of the Chinese mainland. He describes how these region states, each inhabited by 5 to 20 million people, have closer links to other region states in the global economy than to their "host" nations, and constitute essential growing markets for the goods and services of global corporations.

Ohmae concludes that the emergence of the region state changes deeply and forever the global logic that defines how corporations operate and how the governments of nation states understand their proper role in economic affairs. Managers and policymakers must remember that people came first, and borders came afterwards. This masterful analysis will redefine the workings of the global economy for generations to come.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1351449 in Books
• Published on: 1996-05-15
• Released on: 1996-05-15
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .59" h x 5.98" w x 9.20" l, .78 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Nations are becoming obsolete from an economic standpoint, declares Tokyo-based business consultant Ohmae (The Borderless World). He argues that the traditional nation-state, now beholden to domestic special interests, its government "an enemy of the public at large," has become an inefficient, even impossible, business unit in the new global economy. Instead of a world order based on discrete, independent nations, Ohmae envisions autonomous networks of what he calls "region states"?geographically linked economic zones that forge productive ties with the global marketplace by putting the right policies, information technology and infrastructure in place. Examples of emerging region states cited here are San Diego/Tijuana; Hong Kong and southern China; and northern Italy and the Rhine-Alps region of France. Although Ohmae overstates his case, his challenging primer gives managers, economists, politicians and policymakers new ways to think about global economic problems and opportunities.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Ohmae, a former McKinsey & Company senior partner, has touted the global economy in The Borderless World (1990) and Beyond National Borders (1987). His new book spells out more specifically Ohmae's conviction that the nation state and the global economy cannot comfortably coexist. National boundaries are too porous, he argues, to control the flows of communication, corporations, customers, capital, and currencies, and most national governments are too focused on distributing wealth to be effective in creating it. Ohmae sees "region states" --natural economic zones of 5 to 20 million affluent residents, such as Hong Kong and contiguous areas of China, San Diego, and Tijuana or Silicon Valley--stepping into this vacuum, building links with the global economy independent of the nations that theoretically control them. For Ohmae, these changes raise practical, not ideological, issues: nation states should decentralize power and seek to serve as catalysts for the growth of region states, because this is the only sort of growth the global economy is likely to support. The usual free-market leap of faith lies at the heart of Ohmae's argument, but his ideas are provocative enough to appeal to readers struggling to understand the consequences of globalization. Mary Carroll

Review
Walter Kiechel III A visionary should be able to do at least two things: see the future and explain it in a new way. With The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies, Ken Ohmae demonstrates once again that he is an authentic visionary.

Robert L. Bartley Editor, The Wall Street Journal Ken Ohmae has stamped his brand on the idea that the information age will have a big impact not only on business but on the shape of international politics. If the cold war is over and money flows around the globe beyond the reach of governments, who, indeed, needs the nation-state? A bold statement of a provocative thesis.