Globalization refers to the increasing integration between countries. This occurs when national boundaries are reduced or removed and world wide changes are taking place to things such as; trade, investment, finance, labour and technology. Globalization means that people in different countries are becoming increasingly linked by common technologies (for example: Internet, fax, etc.) and through goods and services sold on a global basis rather than national.
The size of the world economy can be measured with GWP (Gross World Product). The result of GWP is reached by adding together the outputs of the world economies. In simpler terms you add all the contributing countries GDP (Gross Domestic Product) together.
The total world GDP is hard to measure accurately because each country has different methods of measurements and units of measure. The figures may vary because inflation rates vary from country to country, differences in exchange rates, variations in statistical methods for calculating asset values, government policies relating to taxation can vary from country to country and inaccuracies in collecting data all contribute to the varying statistics of total GWP.
In the table on the previous page, we can see a clear domination by a few economies. In 5 nations which make up 45.3% of the world's population, over half the world's products are produced by them. Australia is ranked 16th in the globes major producing