Pankaj Ghemawat
"Most Trusted Brands 2011: What Coke learnt about
  globalization and branding"
  The Economic Times
  September 28, 2011

Perhaps the simplest way of understanding the current status of global branding is to look at Milward Brown's database covering 10,000 top brands in 31 countries. Only 16% are recognized in more than one country, and only 3% are recognized in more than seven!

Note that this is the situation more than a quarter century since the late Ted Levitt, once my colleague at Harvard, published his manifesto, "The Globalization of Markets," proclaiming that customers everywhere increasingly want the same thing. Simply because it is fashionable to make such proclamations doesn't mean that it is profitable to take them seriously. Rather, the reverse is true.

  Pankaj Ghemawat
"The Economics of Secession"
  Financial Times
  June 28, 2011

Sir, Xavier Cuadras-Morató and Modest Guinjoan assert (Letters, June 23) that secession from Spain would have a smaller negative effect on Catalan trade than I suggested in my article "The ties that bind Catalonia" (June 17). Their principal argument seems to be that my guesstimate of a two-thirds haircut on Catalonia's trade with the rest of Spain is too high because it is based on the dissolution of empires. To my original points, I would add that estimates such as Jeffrey Frankel's of a two-thirds "pure" border effect do not depend on the historical origin of a particular border. And I would draw further attention to the example of the "Velvet Divorce" between the Czech and Slovak republics, where trading intensity quickly dropped off to a greater extent despite considerable efforts on both sides to preserve trading relationships. Catalonia's separation from Spain would probably not be quite as amicable.

  Pankaj Ghemawat
"Markets and globalization: Chicago, Harvard and the way
  forward"
  Roland Berger Strategy Consultants News
  December 22, 2009

The financial meltdown and other recent upheavals in global markets have raised questions not only about the efficiency of markets, but about globalization as well. Anti-globalizers have sounded the death knell for what they view as exaggerated faith in financial integration, while pro-globalizers have sometimes responded by denying that significant market failures have occurred at all and by blaming governments for the crisis. Thus, in an interview in early 2009, Rupert Murdoch remarked:

"It's very easy to blame the free market but how did we get the housing bubble? We got it because of Congress pushing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into lending money to people who couldn't afford it and blowing up the price of housing; a Fed which was too loose with the money. It just led to this very naturally. When you get a bubble, it has to be lanced and it's painful."

Murdoch's perspective may resonate with those who are already in thrall to the magic of the markets, but it probably won't help convince anybody at the margin.