Globalization's future: insights from a key strategist.

• Position: Off the News

"The essential drive of globalization is to break down the barriers that countries use to protect their businesses from competition and their workers from risk. Its promise is that by breaking down barriers and embracing competition, workers and businesses will create more wealth--and the countries that will prosper in the next decade will be those that open their markets as much as practicable to the ideas and drive of their entrepreneurs, the investments and operations of foreign companies, and the goods and services produced through global networks.

Globalization will produce tens of millions of winners who follow its rules. The most prosperous advanced countries will be those that focus most successfully on what advanced economies do best--creating, adopting, and adapting to powerful new technologies and production processes, new ways to finance, market, and distribute things, and new approaches for organizing and managing businesses....

The next decade of globalization also will exact large costs in every country. Developing nations that remain largely closed and don't invest seriously in their infrastructure and education will slip further behind.... The next decade also...