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Copyright © 2001
Irina STRELETS,
PhD (economics), Associate Professor,
Moscow State Institute (University) of International Relations
MAIN PROBLEMS: INFORMATION RESOURCE COMMERCIAL USES IN RUSSIA
Globalization, with its both positive and negative aspects, is one of the most popular buzzwords of economic thought. The main specific feature of modern globalization is its global - in fact, universal - nature, the involvement of the world’s societies in an open system of political, social, financial, economic, and cultural connections based on modern communication and information technologies.
Communication options, emerging thanks to the communication facilities and Internet technologies development, have become the foundation of this process diminishing the costs of information transmission at personal, production and international levels.
Economic activity is increasing in scale, the frames of the world markets widening even further with the significance of both the real and financial sectors growing. It is necessary to have constant access to the increasing amount of different information varieties, that could help take correct decisions in the short term as well as in the long one.
With the rapidly developing global market of information technologies as well as that of international information (as a wide spectrum of databases) being formed, information is increasingly becoming a very valuable and expensive commodity in fact. This commodity necessitates constant renovation.
No country is able to deny itself the possibility of becoming part of the international information and communication space. The new concept created with this in mind – that of the new economy - is to define the enterprises in the high technologies sphere.
Information is a resource that is implemented across all borders and barriers much easier than any other one, and it is becoming therefore the international globalization processes' major carrier.
This information resource implementation takes place through the network structures.
When M. Castells calls modern global society "network structures society", he emphasizes its universal nature and determining character, with the power of a structure turning out to be stronger than the structure of a power and with the fact of one's belonging to a certain structure coming to be the most important source of power and changes in society.
Firms construct their internal and external connections on the basis of the network principle, and the networks are regarded as structures contributing to the development of a number of spheres and resulting in the world economy globalization in the end.
There is a wide spectrum of spheres where the information processes are of special importance, but I would like to pay attention to the commercial uses of the information resource and to those problems which are emerging for Russia with this in mind.
Very often, different authors, while discussing information technologies, refer to Ronald Coase’s article “THE NATURE OF THE FIRM”, where he asks: Why do firms exist? The answer is: a firm minimizes transaction costs. But information technologies expand this possibility and diminish transaction costs even more. Let’s show some global tendencies demonstrating the shift in the consumer behavior under the information technologies impact.
We see the global changes in the companies’ activities, the business development, the growing importance of knowledge, the market transparency. The Internet networks and co-systems and technologies make information on the markets and the prices worldwide increasingly more available for potential market players. The world market, so far an abstract category to some extent, is increasingly turning into reality. A vivid example is mail-order trade via television or the Internet successfully operating in many countries.
Economic globalization takes place in international trade, international movement of production factors, and international financial operations. The international financial operations volume is rapidly growing. There are international capital flows of direct investment. And, finally, there is international trade.
If we look upon financial operations, we see that the expansion of currency operations and equity transactions, including operations with derivatives, are the most dynamic ones. The direct investment growth is more dynamic than that of the international trade. The growth of trade in services, technologies and objects of intellectual property are among the most dynamic international trade operations.
All of the tendencies mentioned above are reflected in the globalized economy's information environment. The financial data share is increasing. The Internet-technologies development facilitates this process and creates a basis for a more efficient transmission of financial information.
The information potential may be implemented with maximum efficiency under the condition that the communication structures corresponding to the new communications systems are under way. These communication structures would lead to distributing information flows at the optimum level, with the Internet becoming one of them.
Let us turn our attention to some problems arising in the world economy globalization processes in connection with the information space broadening.
All this is accompanied by the considerable complexity of economic life on the global scale. Multinational corporations and banks evolve, the financial sphere broadens, exchange mechanisms become more complicated, etc.
Today, the basic difficulty lies not in receiving information but in treating it in a skillful way.
There are some difficulties in the creation and further development of the network structure. Its establishment demands information flows between those participants of the economic process for which it is being created. In this connection, it is necessary to provide the rapid access of new participants to the existing information resources, a rapid switch of all participants to the new information materials, and the rapid construction of direct multilateral, mainly horizontal, connections between the participants. However, all this is very difficult to achieve.
The intercommunication world instability is becoming stronger; the tendency towards the social contradictions growth in connection with the adaptation to the new technologies difficulties is genuine even for the most developed countries. All these problems have arisen inevitably as a result of the intensive world economy globalization under way.
To solve these problems, we should use global mechanisms (international organizations, international talks), corresponding to the scale of the issue to deal with.
It is time to take profound decisions on restructuring enterprises, public institutions, and administrative bodies. Applied research is becoming more urgent in the field of controlling network structures, investigating the motivation and psychological peculiarities of their participants, and setting up a new corporate culture.
Russia faces many such problems. The complexity of the Russian situation in the world economy globalization is also caused by a number of specific factors such as Russia's transition period difficulties, its extreme heterogeneity (megalopolises, the provinces, and the inner depths of the country) as well as its economic problems.
But integration into the modern global economy is not only desirable but necessary for Russia, and one of the first steps in this direction is Russia's involvement in the world information space to create preconditions for full-fledged successful participation in the world globalization process.
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