ABSTRACT
While there is much discussion of globalization, few scholars have stopped to think about the ultimate outcome. What would an economically integrated world look like? In theory, but not in practice, the ultimate globalized economy may be visualized as one potential marketplace. Conceptually, the competitive playing field would be open across the world's entire area. This does not mean that the world would be supplied from one location, or, alternatively, that population would be spread evenly over the land. As we have noted, the interaction of centrifugal and centripetal forces that govern location suggests that some production activities might be scattered geographically and others will be concentrated in a small number of production centers depending on the economies of scale and transportation costs involved in getting the product to market. Clustering would assemble many industries in common locations, and product differentiation would allow similar but not identical products to compete from different origins. Path dependence would account for continuity in particular locations once production has been established there, though not to the exclusion of competition from newcomer competitors (Brian, 1994).
