Travels in the Riel World

What makes a global city? Foreign Policy magazine just came out with what they call the Global Cities Index - a ”comprehensive ranking of the ways in which cities are integrating with the rest of the world.” They explain their Index this way:

The world’s biggest, most interconnected cities help set global agendas, weather transnational dangers, and serve as the hubs of global integration. They are the engines of growth for their countries and the gateways to the resources of their regions. In many ways, the story of globalization is the story of urbanization.

But what makes a “global city”? … The cities that host the biggest capital markets, elite universities, most diverse and well-educated populations, wealthiest multinationals, and most powerful international organizations are connected to the rest of the world like nowhere else. But, more than anything, the cities that rise to the top of the list are those that continue to forge global links despite intensely complex economic environments. They are the ones making urbanization work to their advantage by providing the vast opportunities of global integration to their people; measuring cities’ international presence captures the most accurate picture of the way the world works.

So which cities came out on top? Not surprisingly, New York led the list, followed by London, Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong. Other U.S. cities in the top 30 were Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, San Francisco and Boston. Toronto came in with a healthy ranking of number 10.

After Tokyo and Hong Kong, the leading Asian cities were Singapore and Seoul. After London and Paris, the European leaders were Brussels, Madrid and Berlin. The Latin American leaders were Mexico City, Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires. And the highest ranked cities in the Middle East and Africa were Dubai, Istanbul and Cairo.

Richard Florida wrote an interesting article a while back in which he suggested that government policy makers would be wise to forge new ideas based on the economic and innovation potential of so-called mega-regions around the world. Much more so than countries or cities, he contends, mega-regions are actually the prime drivers of the global economy.

While there are 191 nations in the world, just 40 significant mega-regions power the global economy. Home to more than one-fifth of the world’s population, these 40 megas account for two-thirds of global economic output and more than 85% of all global innovation.

The world’s largest mega is Greater Tokyo, with 55 million people and $2.5 trillion in economic activity. Next is the 500-mile Boston-Washington corridor, with some 54 million people and $2.2 trillion in output…

Mega-regions are the true force driving the rise of emerging economies. Some 40% of Brazil’s total economy is made up of a corridor stretching from Rio to São Paolo. Russia is propelled by the Moscow mega. India’s economy is shaped by the mega-regions of Bangalore and Mumbai.

China is not our real competitor. Rather, we should be thinking about the great mega-regions around Shanghai, Beijing and the Hong Kong-Shenzhen corridor, which account for roughly 43% of the output of the entire country.

Florida discusses several ways in which governments can support the innovation that arises from mega-regions, from promoting free trade to developing urban policies meant to improve infrastructure and facilitate “greater cross-border flows of goods and people.” It’s a thought-provoking piece that is worth a look.

It sometimes seems as if there is no end to the type of work that can be outsourced these days. Businesses have been outsourcing labor for years, and individuals have figured out how to outsource personal tasks, nursing home care and even pregnancies. Now comes word of the latest work that is being outsourced - legal research. Time Magazine has the story.

Mark Alexander, a Dallas attorney, says he’s ethically obligated to do what’s best for his clients, “and that includes saving them money.” So when one of them asks him to research a securities-fraud topic, for example, or breach of contract, he doesn’t even think about applying his $395 hourly rate. Instead, he calls Atlas Legal Research, an outsourcing company based in Irving, Texas, that uses lawyers in India to provide the service for $60 per hr. “When a client pays me a $25,000 retainer and I can save them money, I will do so,” says Alexander. Handing off the work to a $225-per-hr. junior associate is not an option. “They don’t even know where to stand in the courtroom,” he says.

While the Americans learn, well-trained lawyers in secure offices in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), Bangalore and Gurgaon (outside Delhi), who typically earn $6,000 to $30,000 annually, do legal grunt work…The considerable savings is perhaps one reason Forrester Research, based in Cambridge, Mass., has projected the offshoring of 29,000 legal jobs by the end of the year and as many as 79,000 by 2015.

Perhaps we should call it Outsourcing 2.0, as it’s being described as the next logical step in outsourcing, from lower skill to higher skill jobs. There is obviously a limit, though, as to how much of this work can be done from abroad, which at the moment is limited to legal reseach and document review.

It’s part of India’s inevitable move up the corporate food chain, from lower-value business process outsourcing–like call centers–to knowledge process outsourcing (KPO). The latter category encompasses higher-skilled jobs, such as engineering and medicine, and relies on the KPOs to behave more like branch offices of U.S. companies.

ValueNotes, a business-research firm based in Pune, India, says a subset of KPO called legal process outsourcing (LPO) has grown revenues 49% from 2006, to $218 million last year. The figure will nearly triple, to $640 million, by 2010, it says…

TransUnion, in Chicago, has successfully outsourced legal work for four years, according to general counsel John W. Blenke. “Every law firm is really an outsourcer. One lawyer usually can’t do it all,” he says. Indian attorneys are currently reviewing more than a million litigation e-mails for the company, which costs less than $10 per hr., he says. He would pay $60 to $85 per hr. to a U.S.-based legal-staffing company for the job.

Blenke says he’s cautious, however, about the work he outsources. “You can only do it with a few things. It has to be an area that you know well, so you can build processes around that,” he says.

There was an article in the NY Times this week about the challenges and the allure of doing business in emerging markets around the globe. Or, more accurately, “emerging emerging markets.” Buried within the story was a fascinating account of just how business gets transacted in some cultures.

First, the overview of these markets:

Forget Hong Kong, Beijing, Moscow and Mumbai. Intrepid bankers, investors and hedge fund managers are journeying to farther corners to do deals…

Many of the new investment targets are mineral- or oil-rich nations, like Ghana, where high commodity prices are spurring domestic economic growth, the political framework is solid or stabilizing, and doors are opening to foreign investment. Others, like Vietnam, are adopting capitalism and creating industries. Most of these places have large young populations that are moving from rural economies into cities, eager for cellphones and cars.

Some investors and deal-makers call them “frontier” markets, but there are plenty of other names for these nations. A Merrill Lynch analyst refers to them as “emerging emerging” markets, while Goldman Sachs focuses on the N-11, or Next 11, developing countries.

And, for our purpose of understanding cultures, here is a description of a business meeting in Saudi Arabia in which the actual business was transacted at the very last moment - literally on the way out the door, and only after the necessary relationship-building was accomplished.

Bassam Yammine, a managing director and co-chief executive of the Middle East at Credit Suisse, recently took a colleague from the bank’s London office to see a client in Saudi Arabia. He noticed his guest’s discomfort when, 40 minutes into the meeting, Mr. Yammine, a 40-year-old Lebanese banker, and the client were still chatting about politics and the weather. His colleague shot him a panicked look when everyone got up to leave, still not having mentioned business deals. Halfway out the door, Mr. Yammine turned around, quickly discussed the deal and he and his colleague left the meeting with a check.

“In this part of the world, that’s how you do business,” said Mr. Yammine, who spends his time in Riyadh or Dubai and traveling the region. “Relationships are an important factor in clients’ decisions.”

For more of an understanding of the work culture of this region of the world, check out Margaret Nydell’s book, Understanding Arabs.

The idea of outsourcing is no longer new, and most people take for granted the fact that many manufacturing and service jobs are now being done from abroad. But the outsourcing industry has added a new wrinkle in recent years - that of outsourcing personal tasks. Yes, one can now find a math tutor, a researcher or even a personal assistant abroad, and particularly in India. Two recent stories in the NY Times discussed the topic.

An excerpt from the first article:

Adrianne Yamaki, a 32-year-old management consultant in New York, travels constantly and logs 80-hour workweeks. So to eke out more time for herself, she routinely farms out the administrative chores of her life — making travel arrangements, hair appointments and restaurant reservations and buying theater tickets — to a personal assistant service, in India.

Kenneth Tham, a high school sophomore in Arcadia, Calif., strives to improve his grades and scores on standardized tests. Most afternoons, he is tutored remotely by an instructor speaking to him on a voice-over-Internet headset while he sits at his personal computer going over lessons on the screen. The tutor is in India…

The first wave of slicing up services work and sending it abroad has been all about business operations. Computer programming, call centers, product design and back-office jobs like accounting and billing have to some degree migrated abroad, mainly to India. The Internet, of course, makes it possible, while lower wages in developing nations make outsourcing attractive to corporate America.

The second wave, according to some entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and offshoring veterans, will be the globalization of consumer services. People like Ms. Yamaki and Mr. Tham, they predict, are the early customers in a market that will one day include millions of households in the United States and other nations.

They foresee an array of potential services beyond tutoring and personal assistance like health and nutrition coaching, personal tax and legal advice, help with hobbies and cooking, learning new languages and skills and more. Such services, they say, will be offered for affordable monthly fees or piecework rates.

And from the second story:

In the latest twist on the information-age truism that technology is making the world even smaller, entrepreneurs in India are trying to build a new market for the offshore services they offer: helping small businesses cope with even the most mundane day-to-day tasks.

Thanks to Indian companies like Brickwork India and GetFriday, even sole proprietors can have personal assistants to conduct research, monitor the Web, make appointments and even give them a wake-up call and tell them to get some exercise — all for as little as $15 an hour.

A woman in New Jersey who works for a health care company used the new services to investigate trends in pharmaceutical marketing. An entrepreneur in Toronto used them to build his Web site. A Web designer in Louisiana has them search for images he can use. A builder in Tennessee uses them to get statistical reports on vacant lots before he buys them.

There is a business story in Newsweek magazine that is an interesting read - it sheds some light both on the workplace culture of Google and on the need for corporations today to employ individuals who understand globalization and other cultures. The article focuses on a unique training program that Google has devised for some of its brightest young hires.

There are no computers in the tiny village of Raagihalli, located 30 miles outside Bangalore, India. Overseas visitors seldom venture down the unpaved roads that lead to the 70 or so threadbare huts surrounded by fields vulnerable to the trampling of elephants. So it is fair to say that cultures clashed with the arrival of the Googlers—young masters and mistresses of the Internet, armed with stratospheric SAT scores, computer-science degrees from top universities and some of the most coveted jobs of their generation.

This past summer a group of 18 Google associate product managers (APMs) were circling the globe on a training trip, seeing firsthand the humble, unwired ways of life experienced by billions—including the vast majority of Indians who are more familiar with crop fields than search fields.

…the APM program, which seeks brilliant kids and slots them directly into important jobs—no experience necessary. Surprisingly, Google trains these young execs, knowing many will leave for other jobs in just a few years. Halfway through the two-year program, the APMs travel to foreign Google offices to network with fellow employees, learn about regional markets and soak up local culture.

The story follows the APMs on a 16-day visit to four cities in four countries - Tokyo, Japan; Beijing, China; Bangalore, India, and Tel Aviv, Israel.

In what can only be a good sign for the future of education in this country, recent years have seen a significant increase in the number of American university students who participate in a study abroad program.

According to an article in the International Herald Tribune:

There is a consensus today, much like the one about science and math studies after the launch of Sputnik 50 years ago, that globally fluent graduates are essential to American competitiveness. International exposure, whether study, volunteer work or internship, has become a must-have credential. With the new demand — the number studying abroad is twice that of eight years ago — what was once an add-on has become big business. About 6,000 programs send students to more than 100 countries.

Not only are more students going abroad, but they are also doing it in more creative ways.

… for a generation whose life is calibrated by a multicolored spiral daily planner, just being abroad is not enough. They want to do more than study a language; they want an experience that complements their stateside curriculums.

University of Chicago students can meet a civilization core requirement by attending a 10-week program taught by its own faculty in Mexico, China or India. Half of last spring’s graduating class at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts studied abroad — many in fields like engineering and science, whose rigid course sequences once kept them home. W.P.I. students are tackling projects like creating wireless security systems or flood-prevention plans in places as far afield as Limerick, Ireland, and Cape Town, South Africa.

Additionally, they are searching out more exotic destinations. Such as Ghana:

For a student at the University of Ghana in Legon, a palm-graced suburb of Accra, a dinner might involve fufu — mashed casava and plantains in a soup of peanut butter and tomatoes — from a local “chop bar.” Electricity is not a given. Nor is running water. Students might have to fetch buckets of water to flush the toilet and wash clothes. Forget sleeping in. They rise at 5 a.m., when the chaos and din begin: loud music and evangelical preaching, through megaphones. The “Challenges of Living in Ghana” handout from the University of California advises bringing earplugs.

The country, and its flagship university, have become a newly popular destination for studying abroad: about 300 American students, representing dozens of campuses, take classes at Legon.

There is an interesting new feature in this week’s issue of Newsweek, called “Global Literacy,” which is an effort to start a conversation about some of the things people should know about the world in which we live. In the magazine, there is a series of essays about a wide range of global topics, from the economy and politics to literature and health. Online, there is also a 130-question quiz to test your Global IQ.

Newsweek explains the project this way:

We are hoping to start a conversation about what we are calling Global Literacy—facts and insights about the world (some objective, some subjective) that we think are worth knowing. We are not saying this is all you need to know; just that what you are about to read amounts to a good start…we will be returning to the subject in the coming months, and expect this large-scale undertaking to become an annual project…

In a new Newsweek poll, more Americans were able to name the latest winner of “American Idol” (Jordin Sparks) than could identify the Chief Justice of the United States (John Roberts). We are not tut-tutting or wagging our fingers; there is nothing wrong with knowing the former; our view is that people should probably be fluent with both reality TV and the highest court in the land. Makes life more interesting. It is more troubling, though, that nearly half of the Americans we polled did not know that Judaism is older than Christianity and Islam, or that Libya does not border Iraq…

We do not mean to lecture or hector or show off. To whom much is given, however, much is expected. Americans remain rich beyond most of the world’s imagination—rich in property, in liberty, in security. None of these things is free, and all are vulnerable, either to market reversals, to grasping leaders, to terrorists. But we cannot survive and thrive if we do not know what that world is like—what it loves, what it hates, and why.

You can take the magazine’s Global IQ quiz here.

I’ve written about medical tourism before, and the topic seems to receiving increased attention these days. There was an article about it in the NY Times Sunday travel section. In the story, Joshua Kurlantzick discussed his experiences with medical care in Thailand.

Finishing my lunch at an open-air restaurant in downtown Bangkok, I felt slightly queasy. But by the time the taxi arrived back at my hotel, sweat was pouring out of my armpits, the folds of my stomach, even my shins, and my leg joints buckled as if a diamond-tipped drill was boring into them. As I got out of the taxi, I collapsed onto the street.

The taxi driver shoved me back into his cab, and we wove our way through the city’s infamous traffic to Bumrungrad International, a hospital near my hotel. I barely made it to the emergency room before I passed out. When I woke and remembered what had happened, part of me wanted to bolt from my E.R. bed. I knew very little about Thai medical facilities, and recalled a clinic I’d seen in neighboring Myanmar, where patients had to bring their own linens, needles and even bandages to the hospital.

Yet my Bumrungrad doctor, trained in America, immediately put me at ease. Surrounded by a gaggle of nurses ready to care for my every complaint at any time of day, the doctor informed me, “We’re pretty sure you have dengue fever,” referring to a dangerous tropical disease also known as breakbone fever…While I rested in a spotless room, he designed a program for my recovery, recommended a week of convalescence, and prescribed an array of medication for the searing joint pain.

When I visited Bumrungrad’s cashier, passing the hospital’s high-end restaurants and plush waiting rooms along the way, an assistant handed me the bill. For admittance to the emergency room, a consultation, a room and bags of medications, the total cost came to less than $100.

The increased level of’ medical care in places like Thailand now has some Americans looking abroad for both major and minor health procedures.

My unscheduled visit to Bumrungrad taught me an old lesson - and a new one. For decades, Americans have known they could obtain cheaper health care abroad, and have slipped off to Mexico for small surgeries or Canada for prescription drugs. But more and more people now recognize foreign hospitals can deliver not only cheap but also high-quality health care, and are considering medical tourism even for serious health problems…

Already, more than 150,000 people travel abroad each year for health care. According to Patients Without Borders: Everybody’s Guide to Affordable, World-Class Medical Tourism, a new book by Josef Woodman, overseas care can trim 60 to 80 percent, or more, off the price of major surgeries. Its comparison, for example, shows that a heart bypass in India costs one-thirteenth the price in America, and many foreign hospitals also offer postoperative care that includes a high degree of attention from hospital staff members.

Although India has made most of the outsourcing headlines in recent years, it is far from the only region of the world that is attracting such business. The NY Times, in fact, just ran an article about the growing business of outsourcing in Eastern Europe.

Prague is turning into a center for outsourcing white-collar jobs like bookkeeping, data crunching and even research and development. The Czech Republic and other Central European countries like Poland, Hungary and Slovakia are clamoring to serve the needs of multinational corporations — and themselves.

The United States may turn to India to fill many of its call-center jobs and the like. But Western Europe is turning more frequently these days to its own backyard, transforming a few urban centers of the former Communist bloc into the Bangalores of Europe. American companies are cashing in as well. In recent years, I.B.M., Dell and Morgan Stanley, among others, have outsourced services to Eastern Europe.

The countries of Eastern Europe offer their own unique mix of benefits to companies in Western Europe and North America, which include not only lower costs but also a multilingual language pool and geographic proximity.

What is unusual about Eastern and Central Europe is that their most advanced cities offer a potent mix of attributes that even Bangalore cannot rival: a highly educated, multilingual pool of talent in an increasingly affluent consumer market — all barely a stone’s throw from its prime clients…

The reasons for Central Europe’s new attractiveness for outsourcing are not limited to promising talent at cheap prices… But there is no doubt that low wages in the region appeal to Western companies. Employees in Hungary and the Czech Republic earn a quarter of what employees in Western Europe make; Slovakia’s pay runs only a fifth as much, the statistical agency Eurostat says.

(Also), unlike other regions that compete for outsourcing work, like India or the Philippines, where English is the sole operating language, employees in Accenture’s Central European business speak a variety of languages, giving clients access to people who speak English, French, German, Russian and local languages.

“The key thing is language,” said Andrew Grech, an Australian native who directs Accenture’s operations here. “The other factor is a stable political and economic environment. The Czechs are in the European Union and NATO.”

English has for some time now been a common second language around the globe, used in technology, tourism and business. Now, some universities - particularly business schools - are beginning to teach courses in English, regardless of the language of the country in which the school is located. In part, this is being driven by a desire to attract international students. According to this NY Times article:

In the shifting universe of global academia, English is becoming as commonplace as creeping ivy and mortarboards. In the last five years, the world’s top business schools and universities have been pushing to make English the teaching tongue in a calculated strategy to raise revenues by attracting more international students and as a way to respond to globalization…

Over the last three years, the number of master’s programs offered in English at universities with another host language has more than doubled, to 3,300 programs at 1,700 universities…

“We are shifting to English. Why?” said Laurent Bibard, the dean of M.B.A. programs at Essec, a top French business school in a suburb of Paris that is a fertile breeding ground for chief executives. “It’s the language for international teaching,” he said. “English allows students to be able to come from anyplace in the world and for our students — the French ones — to go everywhere.”

Some argue that this is merely the natural adaptation of an older custom of utilizing a common language for universities.

Santiago Iñiguez de Ozoño, dean of the Instituto de Empresa, argues that the trend is a natural consequence of globalization, with English functioning as Latin did in the 13th century as the lingua franca most used by universities.

“English is being adapted as a working language, but it’s not Oxford English,” he said. “It’s a language that most stakeholders speak.”

Thomas Friedman, in his 2005 book of the same name, coined the now well-known phrase, “The world is flat,” which he described as meaning that “the playing field is being flattened.”  As he wrote:

It is now possible for more people than ever to collaborate and compete in real time with more other people on more different kinds of work from more different corners of the planet and on a more equal footing than at any previous time in the history of the world.

Now, a new report is suggesting that Friedman is only partially correct.  Taking nothing away from the insight that the playing field is more flat, the report claims that “the globe actually is ’spiked’ – that is, studded with regional hot spots that tower above a mostly flat landscape.”

While Friedman’s flat world suggests that innovation can happen just about anywhere, it may be that regional spikes and their behaviors are the more critical factor. A map of the spiked world, for example, shows unmistakable clustering of venture capital, IT employment and patents – key indicators of innovation activity.

In the United States, those clusters occur most obviously in Silicon Valley, but also in Boston, and secondarily in Seattle, Austin and Raleigh. Globally, as the Index of Silicon Valley shows, such clusters occur in Israel, India, Beijing, Singapore, Seoul, Shanghai, Taiwan and Tokyo, and at a handful of locations in Europe.

You can read more and can download the entire 2007 Index of Silicon Valley report here.

The recent World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, included a session dedicated to “creating dialogue for a multicultural world.”

Leaders from religion, education and government agreed that politics is failing to find solutions for the compelling issues confronting peace and democracy in the world today. The solutions, they said, lie in the understanding of diversity, respect for culture and religions and in deeper levels of engagement.

You can see a webcast of the session here.  Among the individual speakers, John J. DeGioia, President of Georgetown University, suggested that:

… globalization has not enabled people to better understand themselves or the backgrounds of others. The current question, he said, is can we take dialogue to a deeper level and learn from each other to draw on our strengths?

And Mohammad Khatami, former President of Iran, noted that:

“The international arena is very dark,” he said. If extremism is not isolated, he warned the threat of war will loom even larger. Much of the world has common goals, he concluded. What is needed is common ground to fight extremism and restore global security.

Other topics of discussion at the Forum included climate change, world trade, the influence of the internet, global health, and a variety of additional subjects.  If you’re interested in reading more about these sessions, a few sites to check out include Davos Conversation, Davos Diary from the NY Times, and ForumBlog.

With all the focus on economic growth and development in the world, it’s interesting to read about a country that may actually be trying to pull back the reins on growth in favor of a more balanced approach.  That, at least, is the story out of Thailand these days, according to this recent article in Newsweek International.

Surayud Chulanont, Thailand’s interim prime minister … has introduced measures to halt the Westernization of Thai society, downsize the role foreigners play in the economy and maximize “happiness,” not growth, as he put it. Surayud’s blueprint draws inspiration from the country’s highest authority: 79-year-old King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the world’s longest-reigning monarch. His Highness has long advocated “sufficiency” in Thai life, meaning humility, simplicity and living within one’s means. Others have a different name for it: “Buddhist economics.” …

Since the late 1990s, a small group of retired officers, bureaucrats and economists have worked to codify the king’s ideas into a unified economic theory … They say it represents a “middle path” between excessive globalization and inwardness, between unbridled capitalism and the welfare state, and between “backwardness and impossible dreams,” as the UNDP report puts it.

One main aim is to mitigate “the inevitable boom-bust cycles” that haunt many developing economies, says Wisarn Pupphavesta, a senior economist at the Thailand Development Research Institute. “I accept that it goes against neoliberal consumer capitalism,” says an economist with close ties to the monarchy. “But we must choose a new way of life.”

Some businesspeople and foreign investors are not impressed and charge that the new policies are slowing the economy, derailing the stock market and guaranteeing a permanent rural underclass.  It’s all certainly food for thought. At the very least it has led to the coining of an interesting new term in “Buddhist economics.”

If you’re reading this blog, then you evidently have an interest in the world. There are countless websites out there which track and discuss global issues and it’s always interesting to wander around the internet for a while and discover new sites.  Here are a few you might want to check out:

FP Passport - Foreign Policy magazine (which is not written for academics, but for the average person with an interest in the world), maintains a daily blog about world issues.

PostGlobal - The Washington Post online has an ongoing discussion about topics of global interest.  It is moderated by Fareed Zakaria and David Ignatius.

Managing Globalization - The International Herald Tribune also has a blog that focuses on globalization and related issues.

Those sites could keep you reading for a while.  Do you have any other favorite sites that cover global topics?

Well, globalization has come to Africa in the form of China, at least.  Chinese leaders are engaging in quite a bit of commercial diplomacy these days as they court business across the African continent.  This week, Beijing is playing host to a China-Africa forum that includes 40 heads of state and representatives from 48 of the 53 African nations.

The official purposes of the three-day event are to expand trade, to allow China to secure the oil and ore it needs for its booming economy and to offer aid to help African nations improve roads, railways and schools.

The unofficial purpose is to redraw the world’s strategic map by forming tighter political ties between China, which has the world’s fastest-growing major economy, and Africa, a continent whose leaders often complain about being neglected by the United States and Europe.

The Chinese efforts are intriguing for the way in which they are approaching Africa.

“The Western approach of imposing its values and political system on other countries is not acceptable to China,” said Wang Hongyi, a leading specialist on Africa at the China Institute of International Studies. “We focus on mutual development, not promoting one country at the expense of another.” …

“China has offered Africa a new model that focuses on straight commercial relations and fair market prices without the ideological agenda,” said Moeletsi Mbeki, a South African businessman and political analyst.

“They are not the first big foreign power to come to Africa, but they may be the first not to act as though they are some kind of patron or teacher or conqueror,” he added. “In that sense, there is a meeting of the minds.”

However, there is a downside to the Chinese approach, as well.

Beijing’s aggressive pursuit of commodities has often been accompanied by generous aid programs, low-interest loans and other gifts that some Western interests say undermine efforts to foster good governing in Africa. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have expressed their concerns that China’s unrestricted lending, including a $2 billion credit line for corruption-plagued Angola, has undermined years of painstaking efforts to arrange conditional debt relief.

Some African economists complain, too, that China wants to extract raw materials for industry and then sell manufactured goods back to Africa, a mercantilist pattern that failed to bring sustained growth in the past.

China has also prompted concerns among human rights groups by using the threat of its veto in the United Nations Security Council to protect Sudan and Zimbabwe against international sanctions. The rights groups say China’s arms exports to Sudan fuel the conflict in Darfur, which has claimed at least 200,000 lives and has forced more than two million people from their homes.

“China insists that it will not interfere in other countries’ domestic affairs, but it also claims to be a great friend of the African people,” said Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch. “But that doesn’t square with staying silent while mass killings go on in Darfur.”

If nothing else, though, the mere fact that China is courting Africa so heavily is a sign that the entire world is now open for business.

In the spring, I had a post about the increasing numbers of Americans who were traveling abroad for surgeries that are often unaffordable at home.  That same topic is in the news again, in the wake of a recent report by the ABC News program Nightline.

Overseas medical travel has been popular for a long time for those patients seeking more minor procedures, like cosmetic surgery, but now everything from hip to heart to brain surgeries are available overseas at a fraction of the price.

Rick Wade, spokesman for the American Hospital Association, said the hospitals in his network aren’t concerned yet. But he admits that this is a sign of how broken some parts of the American medical system are.

Nightline spotlighted the firm PlanetHospital, which bills itself as a medical tourism company.  The ABC report prompted a spate of other coverage, such as this editorial in the Arizona Daily Star.

ABC’s “Nightline” program Thursday reported about PlanetHospital, an online medical-tourism firm that works like a concierge service. The California-based company connects U.S. patients who are unable to afford surgeries at home with doctors and hospitals in six countries.

Rudy Rupak Acharya, who runs the 1-year-old company with his wife, told us that the firm has helped more than 200 U.S. patients travel overseas for surgeries.

Rupak said business is good. His company contracts with about five Americans a week, charging a $295 fee. Patients pay for travel to those countries and for their medical care.  In almost all cases, it’s a bargain.

Is this trend symbolic of the weakness of the American health care system, or of the benefits of globalization?  Or both?