The dynamism and versatility of the New Economy do not adapt easily to theoretical classifications. Its performance turns upside down concepts such as those of developed and underdeveloped countries or that of exporters and importers, with whom we analysed the world in the last half century.
It is an economy forced to reconcile the extremes, where companies are bound to globalize their operations and locate them so as not to lose markets, where commercial strategies oblige them to specialize and diversify at the same time, where some of the countries that progress most rapidly are the house the largest number of poor people on the planet.
The New Economy operates in a less linear reality than that of the 20th century and has fewer certainties and more discontinuities.
It does not intend to control a future led by a flow of constant and dizzying technological changes but rather tries to adapt by adjusting the course.
There will surely be those who think that talking about the emergence of a New Economy is an exaggeration. They could argue that the industrial-entrepreneurial complex has already gone through many transformations in the past and that the economy remains the same.
For some time, the old and the New Economy will continue to live together, as they have done for decades. The balance between one and the other will gradually be altered in favour of the latter but there will be sectors that will be little affected. In some regions the New Economy will flourish faster while its existence will go unnoticed in other places.
Epochal changes are never easily perceived by those living that time. Most men and women who lived the invention of the steam engine (James Watt – 1769) knew that they were witnessing something important but could not distinguish at that precise moment the birth of the Industrial Age.
That invention triggered a process that would hack the “Law of diminishing marginal returns” when professional economists understood that they do not decrease (at least for financial capital) in the presence of innovation and technical change.
As always, those who glimpsed the magnitude of the changes that were coming could have been better prepared to take full advantage of the transformations underway.
