Chapter 1 - The Future

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The Future	53

   The second stepping stone into a one-world economy is undoubtedly the European Union. It links 15 countries and 370 million people. Long in the shadow of the United States, Europe is once again re-emerging as the second global anchor for prosperity and stability. Europe's new single currency, the Euro, consolidates 11 different markets. And, despite rising unemployment in its stagnant traditional manufacturing industries, Europe's software and telecom companies have been pumping out jobs. Germany's newly-deregulated telecom companies alone created 40,000 jobs in 1998. And even in smaller European countries, Finland's Nokia, Sweden's Ericsson, and Britain's Vodafone have shown how the new technologies can revitalize the new century's economies when backed by equally dynamic educational policies.
  The ancient British university town of Cambridge typifies the turnaround. It's now headquarters for an area with 1,159 high-tech firms, spearheaded by Acorn, Cambridge Display Tech and Pipex. Sir Alex Broers, Cambridge University's vice chancellor, "dreams of transforming the entire eastern region of the United Kingdom into a digital hotbed. The masterplan, hatched by officials of town and gown, is laid out in an optimistic document labelled Cambridge 2020."21 It outlines a future where the town remains a tourist-packed beehive of chapels, halls and sprawling lawns - surrounded by rings of industrial parks and chip plants.
  The third stepping stone is the new model of the internationally-targeted small country, particularly such states as Taiwan, Ireland, Finland and Singapore, with pockets elsewhere such as Bangalore in India, and Tel Aviv in Israel.
   When co-author Dryden first visited Taipei in 1964, the capital of Taiwan had only one set of traffic lights: turned on only when a visiting dignitary entered town. Now Taiwan, with 21 million people, boasts 14,000 electronic companies with total sales of $75 billion, mostly exported, including 120 high-tech public companies, with a market worth of $100 billion, sales of $27 billion and 72,000 employees. It also graduates 10,000 engineers and scientists a year and has an active policy to attract back thousands of others who have succeeded in places such as Silicon Valley.22
  Ireland, with under four million people, is an equally dramatic example. Twenty-five years ago it was a poor farming country. Now it is the world's second largest software exporter, after the United States. It

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