ABSTRACT
Because international business (IB) graduates are hired for their broad general culture and ability to look far and wide for opportunities to create value, the textbook’s final Part V delves into the three topics, deemed in several erstwhile McKinsey practitioner studies as likely to have the greatest impact over the years to come: the emergence of the Global South, the Earth’s environmental challenges and technology. The first in this list refers to the radical shift in focus that has occurred over the past 30 years or so, reflecting a combination of saturating markets in the world’s older industrialised countries and rapid growth in their formerly impoverished counterparts The chapter uses a three-stage filter to analyse this latter process, starting with the way many of today’s emerging powerhouses were initially used as manufacturing locations (despite occasionally difficult local operating conditions), before becoming dynamic consumer markets themselves as rising wages created more solvent demand (albeit for products that often have more frugal attributes) and ultimately spawning new multinational enterprises (MNEs) that have moved the focus of many IB flows from a North-North or North-South orientation in a South-South and increasingly a South-North direction.
