Globalization as market integration and the future of international business

This paper reviews economic evidence concerning the international integration of markets and concludes that most measures of market integration have scaled new heights in the last few decades but still fall far short of economic theory's ideal of perfect integration. Intermediate levels of cross-border integration enhance the prospects ofinternational business as a distinct field of study, since such situations cannot--unlike situations of either completeinsulation or complete integration--be folded back into the single-country base case that is the staple of much ofbusiness analysis. Attention to intermediate levels of market integration also suggests some paths that research in.