During the last fifty years, the international economy has experienced a basic change. Improvements in the Internet and other communication tools have had important effects on the world markets. Faster methods of transport from one place to another have made the world seem much smaller to the businessmen. As a result, the world no longer consists of a number of separate and independent economies under the control of different nations. Instead, the nations have been integrated into a single economy, and the integration is becoming more and more complete every year. Now, for the first time in history, we can truly speak of a global economy.
The most dramatic example of this integration was the oil crisis of 1973 and 1974. It came as a great surprise to the public in the industrial nations to discover that they depended so heavily on imported oil and each other. However, the best evidence for the growing integration is the rapid expansion in the volume of world trade. It went up by about 7 percent year by year during the decade from 1990 to 2000, and in several quasi-industrial countries the growth was even more rapid. As a result, some imported products have become so common that they are treated as domestic commodity. Some of them are too common for the public to any more realize they are foreign.
Production has also become international, which is manifested by the large corporations stepping across national borders and establishing branches and subsidiaries in several different countries. As an example, U.S. companies are building many automobiles in China, Canada, Germany, Britain and Japan. In most cases, many components of an automobile are produced in these countries and then shipped to the United States, where they are finally assembled with other parts. When even the United States has the largest number of such corporations, it is not the only one. Other multinationals, for instance, are based in Japan, France, Germany, the UK and Italy.
Labor, too, is much more mobile than in the past. Both skilled and unskilled workers can now readily migrate from one country to another. In Europe, take it for an example, there are large numbers of Turkish workers employed in the German economy. Doctors, lawyers, and other professionals are also finding it easier to work in foreign countries. The labor market has become international, and the number of expatriate workers is continuing to grow. Which of the following statement will best summarize the whole passage